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It's A Free Country

Slideshow: What To Make Of Wikileaks

Images and notable quotes from a recent symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom, sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City.

<strong>Tom Watson, managing partner and founder of CauseWired.</strong>
Tom Watson, managing partner and founder of CauseWired.
I do believe that intent matters. Julian Assange has a point of view and a political intent. This act may have been planned to weaken the current administration. And I worry about the power concentrated in that one man of mystery and his political agenda.

 

(Esther Stein/PDF)
<strong>Rebecca MacKinnon, fellow at New America and co-founder of Global Voices Online</strong>
Rebecca MacKinnon, fellow at New America and co-founder of Global Voices Online
All along we've actually been advising activists to use gmail and Amazon, because they are more protected from DOS attacks. So it's hard to be robust and protected, you have to rely on the private sector.
(Esther Stein/PDF)
<strong>Jeff Jarvis, journalist and creator of BuzzMachine (on right above)</strong>
Jeff Jarvis, journalist and creator of BuzzMachine (on right above)
We are moving from a world that's power to power to one that's peer to peer, and the power will fight back against that.

 

(Esther Stein/PDF)
<strong>Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post</strong>
Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post

In this debate over whether Assange is a jerk or not, we are almost forgetting the actual information that has come out of the leaks. We are seeing a drip-drip-drip of information, and you never know which piece of information will cause the public to stand up and question our policy.

(Esther Stein/PDF)
<strong>Doug Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed</strong>
Doug Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed

The watchdog press was killed by the same forces that prevented us from having the Internet we thought we could have, and that's corporatism and complacency. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want a real Internet? We don't have a peer-to-peer Internet, and the question of whether we want one is the same question of whether we want a real democracy. Right now the net is totally top-down and centralized. But I believe this wikileaks situation gives us a glimpse that it's possible to have a real peer-to-peer net. I just don't know if people will choose that.

(Esther Stein/PDF)
<strong>Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University</strong>
Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University
Wikileaks is a few things. One, it's the world's first stateless news organization, and we don't know what rules apply to it. People feel anxiety, and they fill it with lots of bad ideas about Wikileaks. It's taken this to show us just how stated we actually are. Wikileaks is also a promise to sources -- it says that we will encrypt your documents in such a way that the authorities won't know who you are...and after verifying we will publish to the world. And sources are voting with their leaks -- they are choosing to go to wikileaks over newspapers. That promise is working, and it tells us something about our newspapers. It's that the watchdog press died.

 

(Esther Stein/PDF)
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