Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Clay Shirky on "Wikileaks and the Long haul"

If you're not up for reading the whole thing, here is the conclusion:

I think the current laws, which criminalize the leaking of secrets but not the publishing of leaks, strike the right balance. However, as a citizen of a democracy, I’m willing to be voted down, and I’m willing to see other democratically proposed restrictions on Wikileaks put in place. It may even be that whatever checks and balances do get put in place by the democratic process make anything like Wikileaks impossible to sustain in the future.

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us “You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

(h/t: Ryan Tate)

Via Clay: Glenn Greenwald is a bit harsher: "The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks." I must say after reading it that in addition to the US government, there is no shortage of US businesses covering themselves in disgrace here, too. And by "US businesses," I include a discouragingly large number of media outlets.

(x-posted)

[Added] Via Glenzilla: Why Is Wikileaks A Good Thing Again?

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