Guess I’m not the only one who thinks a war is brewing between ‘the internet’ and the establishment. “Early this morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed reposted a tweet from EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. ‘The first serious infowar is now engaged,’ Barlow wrote. ‘The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.’ Barlow is no stranger to theatrical overstatement; this, after all, is the guy who in 1996 penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” that opened with the lines: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ Barlow was wrong about sovereignty. Despite its name, ‘cyberspace’ runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear. Still, his recent tweet is accurate. There’s a war on for WikiLeaks, and it’s being fought all over the world.”
It’s amazing to think about how much the internet has changed things over time. For example, if you’re a news organization and get an exclusive on something, it’s only going to be exclusive for about five minutes. If you’re making a movie and want to keep a script under wraps, all it takes is one little leak, and then it’s all over the web.
These days, it’s damn hard to keep secrets. If whatever you do depends on the general populace not knowing the details… whether that be running a business, starting a war, or whatever, the internet makes it especially difficult to do that. Of course this also has privacy implications as well.
I guess what I’m trying to say without specifically knowing how to say it is this: we live in an age where the internet makes it possible for everybody to know everybody else’s business. So whatever you do, it’s probably a good idea to expect that it could be made public at any time, and conduct yourself accordingly. And this holds true for not only those running businesses and governments, but also to individuals who are doing something and thinking, “Oh, it’s cool. Nobody will ever find out …” Because if one person finds out, then it’s quite trivial for EVERYBODY to find out.
Yep, I agree… we’ve reached a point where telling someone something, especially via social networking, is essentially telling everyone.
This is a brave new world we’re living in – and we must adjust. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, it just doesn’t work that way this time. Adapt or suffer.
And, you gotta look at it with a positive spin:
With a worldwide sharing of information, we’re now learning more about cultural differences of our fellow humans than we ever have before. We’re being forced to learn, understand, and cope with opinions and traditions that we aren’t used to, or disagree with. We’re learning more about both the good and bad that is happening out there, and it’s forcing us to become a more civilized species as a result.
Those seeking to destroy and/or curb this “freedom of information” movement are working against a huge inertial mass that will eventually steamroll them into submission.
Oh, I definitely do. Although the instant access to so much information/content has certainly led to some problems that are not easily solvable, I believe the good far outweighs the bad and wouldn’t go back to the way things were, even if I could.
People/countries/businesses who find that the internet is ‘screwing the pooch’ so to speak are going to have to adapt, and those that can’t adapt are going to fall by the wayside. There’s just no getting around that fact.
Not so sure about the more civilized bit.
Next step : teach children that old mystic thing called privacy again.
Have them differentiate the public space and the private space. Hierarchize people and information based on trust. Do not think that every single facebook/wlm friend is your friend. Know the difference between things we can tell the world and things we can keep for ourselves. And so on…
The internet is a powerful communication medium. Therefore the question of what and how to communicate becomes, logically, quite important… But once this basic thing is learned, there’s a way to avoid the “you cannot hide from Sauron” nightmare.
Well, it’s quite simple really… if there’s something you don’t want others to know, don’t put it online. Ever. Not in an email, not in an IM, etc. If you do, consider it public knowledge. Even if you’re talking to someone you trust, there’s no guarantee that somebody else won’t come across that information.
Privacy is a fairly modern invention and it’s not really that important.
Privacy only becomes an issue if everyone else has it and you don’t.
Potential Employers seeing drunken photos of you on Facebook is only a problem if they can find people who don’t have drunken photos on Facebook.
The secrets that separate us disappear and you see that people aren’t as abnormal as you once thought they were.
Yes there are so smart people out there who gonna kill themselves if their friends post things about them on facebook…
Or the mexicans who go out and beat people cause their gf got offended in wow.
God damn idiots didnt deserve their life at the first place. And these lawmonkeys who keep crying about how bad wikileaks is should be deported to Africa to work in mines for couple of years.
Edited 2010-12-04 23:44 UTC
I thumbs up’d this story because I think it is important. The war over net neutrality is also being fought, and not coincidentally at the same time. These “infowars” are being fought now because the status quo, the establishment if you like, is changing.
Powerful organizations, whether government or corporate, have for 20 years not known what the internet is. They have great knowledge and power over the “real world” if you want to call it that, but this internet thing had them befuddled for 20 short years.
The befuddlement is no more. Critical knowledge mass is finally being reached by these organizations. Finally they are able to wield their great power over the digital world known as “internet.”
Can I do anything about it? I can start by bookmarking the EFF blog ( http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archive ) or by following @EFF on twitter ( http://twitter.com/eff ).
Well, the ‘establishment’ wants Net Neutrality. It’s a power over the Internet by governing authorities who will decide what is allowed and what is not. Notice how they only allow ‘legal’ content to be neutral. Net Neutrality in its current form is Orwellian. It’s been sold to the public extremely well, by those who stand to gain from it, namely: Big Content. Treating all packets neutrally was never how the Internet was designed.
Look at the high-ups who support NN in the US. Obama, Pelosci, etc, etc.. All the puppets of the globalist central banks and globalist corporations.
Edit: The need for NN has been blown way out of proportion. Sure, there’s some concern, but the real solution isn’t policing every router’s routing table.
Edited 2010-12-05 05:05 UTC
Conspiracy theory nutso: check
Edited 2010-12-05 05:29 UTC
“it’s forcing us to become a more civilized species as a result.”
That would be nice!
Reality is different. The gap between rich and poor is getting greater and greater, in the last 500 years or so this lead to war, revolution or something similar. Politicians are a bunch of professional liars, lying for a living. Extreme rightwing is growing at a rapid pace, organising itself through the internet.
So the only thing I see is a diminishing level of “being civilised”.
When we do not start teaching our children social behaviour things will escalate untill the next catatrophy. People need social control, where we as a society fail to do this, things like a collapsing finance-system will happen.
Wikileaks is trying to give us back some kind of control and I find it disgusting how governments react, but it is nothing new.
Like in the 1930s govenments are doing their utmost to take control over their citizens, and it is amazing that the same politicians alway get elected, even if they cheat and lie. Like in germany where the governement decided that 2,28 Euro a month is sufficient for an unemployed to have Internet.
We all should be more carefull whom we vote for, or get more active in politics ourselves in order to bring about some change.
I agree that the internet is a great medium to organise people but it is also an image of society itself.
Edited 2010-12-04 13:55 UTC
I don’t understand how Wikileaks publishing **diplomatic communication** (whose confidentiality, as I said in a comment about another story days ago, *nobody* had a problem with before the leak) gives you or me or the regular Joe some “kind of control”. Raise awareness to crimes committed in Iraq or Afghanistan, yes, I applaud it as it’s a good thing worth having public opinion put its weight behind the fight you are fighting. Disclosing diplomatic communications is stupid and a supplicant call for being lynched.
I didn’t understand you there: does the internet access cost 2,28 euros for an unemployed in Germany? Are you for or against it? How does that price for unemployed people relate to the same politicians being reelected?
Edited 2010-12-06 09:17 UTC
What the world governments need right now, is true transparency.
keep dreamin’!
join “attak” or “transparency international”.
Trafficking in stolen goods is not exactly an issue you want to advocate Thom. This is not about freedom of information, or freedom of speech. If you really believe that, you’re actually harming such causes.
There needs to be a movement to write a new Internet Protocol with distributed encrypted DNS, random IPs and distributed hosting but yet compatible with HTTP browsers.
Wouldn’t it make sense for WikiLeaks to survive under an encrypted darknet, such as I2P, FreeNet, or something? Perhaps they could mirror the huge volumes of information they’re holding in that encrypted P2P-based web zone to continue fighting the good fight?
Some information about governments have been leaked out thanks to whistleblowers and WikiLeaks but that is nothing compared what governments know about YOU. You are constantly monitored by secret service agencies. All your communication is read and monitored, wherever you go you leave traces, you are under constant surveillance in the streets, shops, gas-stations, cabs, offices, your mobile phones are tapped… Government knows everything about you: your healt condition, your income, your credit-card transactions… – but YOU, you know nothing or a little bit about the government.
Dictators just cut the internet off or like China does filter it, US government ‘just’ freezes WikiLeaks accounts and orders internet providers to stop hosting ‘unfriendly’ web sites. For what? WikiLeaks is just a publisher like any other newspaper. People have to understand that WikiLeaks didn’t break any law by publishing leaked classified documents. many newspapers and TV stations do that every single day. What US government is doing now is an attack on the freedom of speech. Criminals are those who say that Julian Assange should be killed.