Julian Assange: Facebook Is 'Appalling Spy Machine' (VIDEO)

In an interview with Russia Today (RT), Julian Assange called Facebook the "most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented."

He told RT's Laura Emmett, 

Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence.

It's not new ground for the Wikileaks founder. In March, Assange told Cambridge University studentsthat the Internet is "the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen."

During the Russia Today interview, Assange explained that Facebook, Google and Yahoo all provide automated interfaces for the U.S. intelligence (starts around 2:00 in the video below). "When they add their friends to Facebook," Assange said, "they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies."

Unlike The Onion's prescient fake news piece that poked fun at Facebook's success as a CIA program earlier this year, Assange says that these Web sites aren't being run by the government. Instead, the intelligence community is able to "bring to bear legal and political pressure to them."