For more than six months, Wired‘s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories//salon
“We’ve led the coverage on this story, and we would gain nothing by letting another scoop simmer unreported on our hard drives…He doesn’t cite what authority he believes the government should wield to strip convicted hackers of their First Amendment rights.”//K.Poulsen:::wired
It’s a high-stakes conflict between corporations that have grown fat and powerful off the web over nearly two decades and the first generation to grow up with the modern internet as a daily element in their lives.//wired
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,”..“To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.”//Theodore Roosevelt
There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency…….But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.///zunguzungu.
“The right to access information held by public authorities is a fundamental human right subject to a strict regime of exceptions,” the statement reads. “The right to access to information protects the right of every person to access public information and to know what governments are doing on their behalf. It is a right that has received particular attention from the international community, given its importance to the consolidation, functioning and preservation of democratic regimes.”
“Without the protection of this right, it is impossible for citizens to know the truth, demand accountability and fully exercise their right to political participation.”//UN@register
Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy. //salon
“This is a normal police investigation. Let the police find out what actually happened. Of course, the enemies of WikiLeaks may try to use this, but it begins with the two women and Julian. It is not the CIA sending a woman in a short skirt.”//guardian
Assange’s intolerance of any questioning of his decisions is well documented, so the Guardian can hardly be surprised at its former friend’s reaction.//Reg
“You can never take that information back once it’s out there,” he said. “And it takes very little information to ruin a person’s life.”//RS
“They did everything they could, but you can’t really identify that someone’s going to do what he’s accused of at that level. You can never tell what somebody’s going to do.”//wired
And second, if technological change causes respectable old-media organisations such as the Guardian and the New York Times to go bust and be replaced by blogs, what happens to freedom of the press, and indeed to freedom of speech?//LBT
With free software, we can at least control what software does in our own computers.//R.Stallman
Filed under: collage, cyberanthropolgy | Tagged: Assange, Greenberg, Lamo, Manning, Poulsen, wikileaks | Leave a Comment »
