Why Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business And Big Government | The New Republic

Why Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business And Big Government | The New Republic
Big claims all around.

Fall, 2010 - Social Research | Find Articles at BNET

Fall, 2010 - Social Research | Find Articles at BNET
Lots of articles on secrecy and privacy in government and society.

The Limits Of Online Dissent - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2010

The Limits Of Online Dissent - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2010

These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to "manipulate the medium". This is what he told them: "Here's what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in 'Liberal books'. I go through and I say 'one star, one star, one star'. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in 'Movies on healthcare', I don't want Michael Moore's to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click … If there's a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That's how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance."

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe

But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Scholars, at first delighted with the new access to information, began to despair. “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the great humanist of the early 16th century.

WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to internet speech - CNN.com

WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to internet speech - CNN.com

What is troubling and dangerous is that in the internet age, public discourse increasingly depends on digital spaces created, owned and operated by private companies. The result is that one politician has more power than ever to shut down controversial speech unilaterally with one phone call.

...

As far as the law is concerned, Amazon is off the hook. Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia -- run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives -- is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces.
The law gives Amazon the right to set its own rules. The company's terms of service clearly state that it "reserves the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content in its sole discretion." By clicking "agree," the customer has legally consented to "represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content," and that said content "will not cause injury to any person or entity."

Hackers Defend WikiLeaks, Testing Online Speech - NYTimes.com

Hackers Defend WikiLeaks, Testing Online Speech - NYTimes.com
The ripples from the WikiLeaks affair just keep growing and serve as a challenge not just to diplomacy but the companies of the wider web.

LRB · John Lanchester · Let Us Pay

LRB · John Lanchester · Let Us Pay
Good reading on the plight of newspapers in the era of the web.

WikiLeaks: WikiLeaks degenerates into gossip | The Economist

WikiLeaks: WikiLeaks degenerates into gossip | The Economist
This Economist article seems to be spot on.

Diplomatic cables are something entirely different. It's part of the nature of human communication that one doesn't always say the same thing to every audience. There are perfectly good reasons why you don't always tell the same story to your boss as you do to your spouse. There are things Washington needs to tell Riyadh to explain what it's just told Jerusalem and things Washington needs to tell Jerusalem to explain what it's just told Riyadh, and these cables shouldn't be crossed. There's nothing wrong with this. It's inevitable. And it wouldn't make the world a better place if Washington were unable to say anything to Jerusalem without its being heard by Riyadh, any more than it would if you were unable to tell your spouse anything without its being heard by your boss.

But, in a digital world, can we now assume that anything we say in confidence is really in confidence and will not find its way to some unintended audience, or that that unintended audience already has a way of reading this information. It is likely that we--in some ways--just have to accept a new openness because it is here already.

WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to internet speech - CNN.com

WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to internet speech - CNN.com
Very interesting piece on the Amazon / WikiLeaks issue. The article focuses on two cases where Senator Lieberman has asked material to be removed from web servers -- once YouTube and in the present case Amazon -- but with different results.

Amazon's dumping of WikiLeaks at one senator's request brings into stark relief one of the core problems Americans have grappled with since before our country even existed: Where is the right balance between security, on one hand, and civil liberties, on the other?

With WikiLeaks, Amazon shows its power over customers - Computerworld

With WikiLeaks, Amazon shows its power over customers - Computerworld
When we talked in class about the question of whether WikiLeaks would make government more or less open, we did not know about this action by Amazon. However, it is interesting to note that the WikiLeaks crisis has forced open actions like this, making a big company like Amazon show how much it relies or is willing to bend to pressure from the government.
On a related issue, John Doyle speculates in this morning's Globe and Mail about the cancellation of a CBC TV show -- Intelligence -- and speculates that it may have had a political connection.

The context of the U.S. memo about Canadian TV is a pervasive U.S. worry, if not outright indignation, about how these shows “feed long-standing negative images of the U.S.” So who cancelled Intelligence? The CBC, the minority Conservative government or the U.S. embassy? Or all three?

from John Doyle The Globe and Mail

In Awe of Google (Social Studies Blog)

In Awe of Google (Social Studies Blog)
A follow up on the NYT piece commented on earlier about how terrible customer reviews only helped one businessman improve his sales.
It turns out Google was able to make very rapid changes to its system to fix this problem, at least in part.