Articles
Information wants to break free
Editorial?
This week we focused on the fight for freedom of information. Why? We found all the hot stories to be somehow related to it. On the one hand we have all in favor: the Anonymous, Wikileaks, Swartz; whilst on the other, we have those against: Murdoch, the Fortune 500 Corps, and sadly, our democratically elected Governments – ‘our’ here denotes those living in the ‘Free’ world - which is funny considering the bold statements and the importance they allegedly put on the value of freedom. So to close the week, we will be publishing something which might well look like some kind of editorial, divided in 3 parts.
Here's part one.
Hunting down the Hacker
It seems that there is a lot of fuss over hackers nowadays. What is sure is that this, which started gaining prominence in mainstream media with the hacking of Mastercard and Visa following the financial blockade which they imposed on Wikileaks, has apparently led to a mass media coverage and a string of arrests throughout the world.
Yesterday it was the turn of Mr. Aaron Swartz, whose arrest we also covered in a previous edition, and even published his manifesto. We published the manifesto because we hate media intoxication – you know, the one Murdoch is engaged in. Intoxication is bad because it has the power to mislead and confuse people about what is really going on in the world. In the case of Julian Assange’s arrest, intoxication could easily turn public opinion against him. This would be rather convenient as it would serve as a sound justification of his unfounded extradition and sentencing as the terrorist, they portray him to be.
Let’s us remind ourselves that publishing information meant to be hidden from the public is by no means an illegal activity, nor it is morally wrong – journalists are involved in it every day. In the case of Aaron Swartz, media intoxication would also conveniently serve to discredit the open movement. There is no worst thing, we believe, than being misunderstood by the public, especially when engaging into acts (such as sharing) defined as illegal at the time of action. But for the time being, it is illegal - and illegal = prosecution. And there go the headlines:
"In Spain, authorities proceeded to arrest the group which is allegedly behind the hacking of Sony, which led to the lost of the records of more than 100m users".
"In the US, Fourteen alleged hackers have been put in FBI’s custody, charged as suspects for an online attack on PayPal, which was claimed by hacking group Anonymous. The PayPal attack suspects were arrested in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington DC, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio, US officials said in a statement".
"In the UK, Scotland Yard told the BBC that it had arrested a 16-year-old boy in south London on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990. "The Metropolitan Police is liaising with the FBI and indeed with our Dutch colleagues," a Scotland Yard spokesman said".
Our position on this topic can be well summed up by the following sentence; a statement which is derived from one of our previous post on Aaron Swartz’s Open Access Manifesto. Gov2u has not become a radical organization all of a sudden; we are simply following our times – whilst others are not, and are fighting hard to maintain the status quo. And although we do not officially endorse illegal activities, we're only reporting it but we do not always consider something to be morally right, because it is legal, nor do we consider something to be morally wrong, because it there is a law against it. Large corporations such as Sony, Paypal, Visa or Mastercard spend billions for legal advice on how to best exploit the existing legal loop holes to cheat society out of paying taxes. It's legal. Is it moral?
Anyway, that's a lot of fuss over geeks and nerds sat behind a computer screen, don’t you think?
There must be something else to it. Stay tuned for part 2.
The illustration used has been retrieve from the Open Clipart Library: a project aiming to create an archive of clip art that can be used for free for any use.