The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another....We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men. Gustav Landauer,
Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption. //J. Assange
This demonstrates the fundamental flaw in web-mediated services. While the Internet itself may have a high immunity to attacks, a monoculture hosted on it does not. We might be able to survive a technical outage, but a political outage or a full-fledged termination of service are likely to put a company that's relied on the cloud for critical infrastructure out of business.
The problem is that we have a society with the governments that it deserves, ready to encourage summary judgement rather than consider matters deeply. The only protection we can even hope to trust today is to take contractual measures and to be ready to self-host in the age of the digital lynch-mob. Software freedom never mattered more.
But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.
“I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest.”
"prestige" was in play in management of the Kunduz DynCorp matter and another recent event in which Blackwater contractors mistakenly killed several Afghan citizens.understood that within DynCorp there were many "wonderful" people working hard, and he was keen to see proper action taken to protect them; but, these contractor companies do not have many friends.
Despite their evil looks and repellant behaviour, they are just being reptiles, doing what reptiles do. Working with them is not a matter of relying on their goodwill. It’s all down to understanding their instincts – and learning to stand in the right place.
