“Julian Assange and his collaborators enacted a true and authentic political event,” writes philosopher Slavoj Žižek in The New Statesman. “But what do we mean by that, and how does it influence our actions?”
Also just released: Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index 2014.
Privacy International's The State of Privacy 2014 is out.
Daniel Ellsberg, the former State and Defense Department official who leaked 7,000 pages of Top Secret documents on the Vietnam War in 1971, turned up on Reddit to answer questions, as well as to spread the news that his organisation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, has elected Edward Snowdon to its board of directors.
Turkey is making moves to curb online rights, reports Global Voices Advocacy's 'Netizen Report': “A draft law currently before Parliament would give the Turkish government new powers to access and retain user data, and to block content deemed illegal in 'emergency' situations without judicial oversight.”
(Image: flickr: Meet the Media Guru/biatch0r/Robert Douglass/Doc Searls)
In a recent talk in Berlin, Micah L. Sifry examined what the examples of Swartz, Lessig, Assange & Snowdon have to teach the transparency movement. “We need to ask whether the lone hacker hero archetype makes for a healthy and strong movement, ” he says. The text of his talk can be read on Techpresident.
Ethan Zuckerman, in an interview with the Washington Post: “Digital media needs to find ways to balance the power of choice with the power of arbitrary connection, and I believe it’s possible we can build systems that offer the best of both worlds.”
Medium.com offers “a diagnosis after a tragic year of revelations on global surveillance”.
“Some people are calling 2014 the 'Year of Encryption', writes James Andrew Lewis on the Center for Startegic and International Studies website. He offers a brief history of encryption policy.
(Image from the BBC: a screenshot of the Angry Birds website, which was defaced after revelations that the NSA had been using 'leaky apps' to collect personal data).
