konnexus

I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.

-- Julian Assange on SNL, 2010-12-19

WikiLeaks is the America's Tienanmen. Julian Assange is the tank guy. We all hold our breath to see if we go all the way.

-- Dave Winer: America's Tiananmen, 2010-12-31

Je geheimniskrämerischer und ungerechter eine Organisation ist, desto mehr lösen Lecks bei ihrer Führung und in ihren Planungszirkeln Angst und Paranoia aus. Das muss zu einer Minimierung der effizienten internen Kommunikationsmechanismen (und einem Anstieg der kognitiven ,Kosten der Geheimhaltung') führen, sowie zu einem daraus folgenden systemumfassenden kognitiven Rückbau, der wiederum dazu führt, dass ihre Fähigkeit, sich an der Macht zu halten abnimmt, da die Außenwelt ihnen Anpassung abverlangt.

-- Julian Assange in seinem Blog, Silvester 2006 (Blog offline)

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.

-- Clay Shirky in seinem Blog, 2010-12-06

I can use Visa and Mastercard to pay for porn and support anti-abortion fanatics, Prop 8 homophobic bigots, and the Ku Klux Klan. But I can’t use them or PayPal to support Wikileaks, transparency, the First Amendment, and true government reform.

-- Jeff Jarvis in seinem Blog, 2010-12-07

1. The Internet is not—like print or radio or TV—a medium that you just "get" or not. It evolves at the speed of millions of hands and minds
2. Information causes transformation. To understand the energy of any transformation you need to compare the altered shapes before and after
3. What notions have altered in shape because of Wikileaks? Among others a) Journalism b) Law c) Liberty of Speech
4. a) journalism has a new module of getting secret information without being directly involved with the whistle blower problematic.
5. b) Law has shown it's weakness of easily being instrumentalized by people in power. The laws of many countries have been—raped.
6. c) Liberty of speech is being wrecked. Many people I regard as fearless were too scared to publically mention the event of the year.
7. Wikileaks makes one major mistake: It rightfully claims neutral territory, but its charismatic representative tells Clinton to step down.

-- Oliver Reichenstein auf Twitter, 2010-12-09

Put not your faith in cloud computing: it will one day rain on your parade. (What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us)

-- John Naughton ins seinem Blog, 2010-12-04

Sure: there's a balance to be struck between confidentiality and disclosure. But I'd argue that we're not even close to discovering it.

-- Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review

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“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails…Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy… Conspirators are often discerning, for some trust and depend each other, while others say little. Important information flows frequently through some links, trivial information through others. So we expand our simple connected graph model to include not only links, but their “importance.” Return to our board-and-nails analogy. Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The “importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate apriori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of important communication flowing across it. Questions about conspiracies in general won’t require us to know the weight of any link, since that changes from conspiracy to conspiracy.

-- Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” via "Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy"