At national conference on media reform, Boston – April 8th
Micah Sifry @Mlsif talking. Thanks to resilience of 1000s of ppl – it is a transnational journalism [when wikileaks was taken down many put it up and mirrored it]. Ppl who were audiences are now actors, and ppl of authority now know we are watching them. They have to know that it is a question of trust by being transparent and truthful not by your degree. Wikileaks itself is broken. Assange is a flawed figure – I don’t like the way he runs the org. Hardly an eg of transparency in action: what is it releasing and why? How they get info and why the portal is now not secure? NYT is clearly broken: it has an entire set of cables. How they handled the database inside the building was not good. They did keyword searches. How did they not find kleptocracy? Bec now we know Libya was like that. This is an incredibly valuable archive sitting there but maybe they should open it up in some fashion for us. Two last points: clearly Obama’s commitment to transparency is broken. Wikileaks made it clear we had two govs in US: one that elects and one that makes decisions. We have to dismantle that if we are ever going to live in a truly open society. Wikileaks showed us how valuable the internet is, it can be a source for democracy but it is incredibly fragile. When Sen. Lieberman made Amazon go offline, it showed us how we are similar to McCarthyism. This goes beyond net neutrality – what’s at stake is ability to access info that we need and we have to make sure we continue to do that.