I am cheerfully optimistic that truth and trust will be the common currency of the 21st Century. This effort out of Hungary offers useful reflections on the degree to which privacy and anonymnity are necessary to “out” the old sovereignty and achieve a new sovereignty of the whole.
Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the cloud
Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists — both outsiders to an organization — to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly.
Being Anonymous in the context of Wikileaks has a double promise: it promises to liberate the subject from the existing power structures, and in the same time it allows the exposure of these structures by opening up a space to confront them.
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The true potential of the cyberspace is not that it enables anonymous observation of the state power, but that it offers its citizens the chance to hide from observation. In other words the identity-protecting side of technology has more emancipatory power than its capability to obtain and expose secrets. Maybe less, and not more transparency is the path that leads to the aims of Wikileaks.
2010-12-04 How WikiLeaks builds a global open source insurgency