Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Hmm ....

... Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)

... he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy ...

How does he describe North Korea, I wonder? What Assange will accomplish is that governments will learn to keep the lid on their communications more tightly than before.

One thing I am not about to do is regard Julian Assange as any sort of hero. He has no more right to break laws with impunity than anyone else. If he wants to do it, fine. But let's not hear any whines if he is made to pay for doing so.

3 comments:

  1. Readers should make sure to take in the whole post so as to understand this statement in context - and several others that Aaron (Mzungu) has subsequently posted. For example, he continues:

    'For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.'

    As to whether governments will succeed in keeping the lid on their communications in this radically new age ... well, the jury is still out on that one.

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  2. I agree with Lee.

    In this context, I recall the librarians of the United States refusing to comply, in an act of civil disobedience, with the government request to turn over their records of who borrowed what from the library. The invasion of privacy issue trumped the anti-terrorist rhetoric on that occasion. The context mattered then, as it matters in this instance. The end result was that the government backed down.

    I think it's possible that WikiLeaks will force a similar retreat from unnecessary secrecy policies—which is the whole point. Most of what I've heard from callers on public radio this past week is outrage against government secrecy policies—which is a promising sign.

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  3. No doubt that governments want more things to be kept secret than should be kept secret. But this hardly means that there are some things that ought not to be kept secret -- especially if making such things public endangers the lives of our troops, for example. I think the likelihood of governments doing a much better job than they have been of keeping the lid on things is actually pretty good -- simply because it is so much in their self-interest to do so.

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