Archive: Category: TechPresident

I'm excited to announce that in mid-February OR Books, a small independent press based in New York City, will be publishing my seventh sixth book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. You can pre-order copies or e-books here. The book is not meant to be a treatise on WikiLeaks, nor an exhaustive discussion of the future of secrecy or privacy. But it is very much inspired by WikiLeaks and the fierce debates it has set off. The book aims to be a report from the trenches where a wide array of small-d democracy and transparency activists are hard at work in the United States and other countries using new tools and methods to open up previously closed and powerful institutions and...

If you're like me and about to take off for some holiday R&R, you may be hunting around for some good reading to bring with you. Now, these suggestions are not for you if you want something truly non-work-related. But on the chance that you're going to take at least one thoughtful piece of non-fiction with you as you recharge your batteries, here are some helpful suggestions, starting with three musts: Nick Bilton's "I Live in the Future...

I've added some fresh gleanings to our WikiLeaks Reader: Ethan Zuckerman et al, "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites," The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, December 20, 2010. The authors write: "In this paper, we explore the specific phenomenon of DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights organizations, seeking to understand the nature and frequency of these attacks, their efficacy, and the responses available to sites under attack. Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth." Ethan Wilkes,...

Back in 2009, Daniel Domscheit-Berg applied to the Knight News Challenge in the name of Wikileaks for $532,000 to fund a project to "improve the reach, use and impact of a platform that allows whistle-blowers and journalists to anonymously post source material." At the time Domscheit-Berg was known to the world by the pseudonym "Daniel Schmitt" and made frequent appearances on behalf of Wikileaks alongside its editor-in-chief Julian Assange (including at the October 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference in Barcelona). Now, as is widely known, he and Assange have parted ways and Domscheit-Berg is part of a group organizing the launch of OpenLeaks.org, which is being described as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as...

I didn't have a lot of time to digest what was being said while I was running the first session of Saturday's PdF Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom, but as I look back, the points that stuck with me the most came from "independent diplomat" Carne Ross. The released cables aren't just gossip, he told the audience; they're quite disruptive. Because it has information, Wikileaks now has power, and with power comes responsibility he argued. And the core issue is the gap between what states say and what they do; a cable dump from, say, Sweden's foreign ministry, would be fairly boring because the country pretty much practices what it preaches. Internet-driven transparency of the kind being delivered by...

Here at PdF, we're obviously paying close attention to the unfolding Wikileaks drama. But what about America's political-technology professionals, the people who, as Nancy put it in her earlier post today on DDOS, "at one point or another in their careers, were responsible for major web presences and web services for some of the biggest political candidates, publications, and advocacy groups in American politics"? What are they thinking about Wikileaks? About a dozen people shared their thoughts with us (and a few others took a pass, citing the delicacy of the issue). You can read their full comments below, but here are the highlights. First, on a scale of 0 to 10, there's a wide variation in just how closely people...

We're pleased to publish this guest post by Mary Joyce, the founder of the Meta-Activism Project, which is studying the many permutations of digital activism today. The editors. A few weeks ago, powerful corporations like Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal weren't very concerned with the hacktivists and pranksters on 4chan. Now, thanks to the tactical success of Operation Payback's DDoS attacks, they are. The U.S. government also has its own problems with networked activists. After massive leaks of documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars and diplomatic cables from around the world, Wikileaks has demonstrated that it is a formidable threat to American legitimacy and power. These are but two recent examples of how decentralized digital networks can have...

Yesterday's symposium on Wikileaks and internet freedom was like a great jazz concert. We got an all-star array of great musicians who know how to play from a score that is being written in real-time; we heard many great solos, some improvised and some carefully planned in advance; and at times we even heard the ensemble start to gel like a well-rehearsed band. There were discordant notes too, and maybe not enough of them given how hard the music really is. I highly recommend replaying the event (it's archived here in two parts) and paying close attention to what each speaker said; when you're listening in real-time and trying to also ingest and participate in the backchannel conversation on Twitter (or...

Or, the new media ecology in six easy tweets: See also Doc Searls' take....

Here's a list of essential posts on current Wikileaks controversy, starting with coverage by techPresident's editors and including posts by the various speakers in Personal Democracy Forum's December 11 New York City symposium on Wikileaks and internet freedom, plus others we've found useful and/or provocative. BY OUR STAFF Micah L. Sifry, "From Wikileaks to OpenLeaks, Via the Knight News Challenge," December 17, 2010. How a $532,000 grant the Knight Foundation decided not to award fits into a creative split in the WikiLeaks organization and the creation of a less centralized engine for safe leaking, OpenLeaks. Nick Judd, "The Art of Anonymous," December 16, 2010. How the hive mind recognizes itself, design-wise. Nancy Scola, "The Web's Social Contract: Does It Exist? Are Wikileaks Takedowns...