[LINK] How wikileaks was an inevitable result of the internet

[Kim Holburn]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12007616

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> Net conflict
> In a statement dictated to his mother from his jail cell Assange said "we now know that Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are instruments of US foreign policy", referring to the way in which these large companies had decided not to provide service to Wikileaks.
> 
> But nobody who has observed the growth of the internet could have been surprised by this.
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> Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith wrote about this back in 2006 in their excellent book Who Rules the Internet, where they pointed out that government will always go after gatekeepers and choke points in their attempts to regulate online activity.
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> In that same year, Visa and Mastercard refused to pass funds to the Russian music download site allofmp3.com, even though the site was legal within Russia, but that attracted little attention because it was about cheap music and not freedom of expression.

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> Something similar lies behind the emergence of Wikileaks. Over the past two decades we have built the internet and the web and completed a process of digitisation that has turned most of the world's operational data into electronic form, from bank records to love letters to diplomatic cables.
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> Status quo
> We have called forth the network age, and yet carried on in our daily lives as if nothing has really changed.
> 
> As a result we made this moment inevitable, even if it was impossible to predict the form our "destructor" would take.

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> Now it has materialised as a stateless, shapeless "international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and news leaks", as Wikipedia describes it.
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> That organisation is threatened from outside by some of the most powerful states in the world, whose capacity for action is enormous. It is also challenged from the inside, as internal mails and documents, made available online on the Cryptome site reveal.
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> But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the internet has been conclusively demonstrated, and the old order has been  provoked to respond.
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> This is democracy's Napster moment, the point at which the forms of governance that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society prove wanting in the face of the network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the internet could transmit perfect digital copies of compressed music files.

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-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
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