In an excerpt from This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information, Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg details a short stint at ‘Chaos Communication Camp’, the setting for security-testing of the WikiLeaks spinoff, OpenLeaks. For those who don’t know, WikiLeaks is in the business of declassifying sensitive information, primarily by it gathering from inside sources and distributing it over the Internet — a practice that has been the focus of legal concern as of late. The OpenLeaks project, intended as a secure, open-source successor to WikiLeaks, is spearheaded by German technology activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg — though since 2011 , the project has not made progress.
Greenberg tells the story of the failure of OpenLeaks to launch for testing at the Chaos Communication Camp in a neat observational fashion. It comes to pass that the group of hackers balk at Domscheit-Berg’s sequestration of the OpenLeaks code that has been touted as open-source, and at the purported link between OpenLeaks and the German Privacy Association — an organization that couldpossibly have ties to ‘the spooks’. Most problematic, though, is that the site simply won’t go online, so Greenberg argues.
The difficult problem of information liberation is largely ignored by Greenberg in this small excerpt, though. I doubt his intent is to do so — more likely, it’s just not really essential to this short segment of the book. However, it seems as if there is no moral quandary to be had based on Greenberg’s writing; his style…hero-izes, maybe?…the hackers who are the subject of this reading by not calling into question the ethical implications of WikiLeaks Pt. II. While the purpose of WikiLeaks was primarily to release government documents that might result in public awareness, i.e. detention policies for domestic and international federal prisons, the precedent is then set for anyone to do the same, and maybe for more sensitive information. Greenberg’s lack of focus on the ethical aspect of the problem under consideration is a bit tough for me to swallow, since I hardly know where I stand on it. I’d like to know more about the bits of information released by WikiLeaks and Openleaks (if it ever launches), before I’m totally comfortable with the hacker guerrilla-style environment detailed by Greenberg.
Good point about the lack of ethical deliberation on the issue of leaking. At least in this excerpt, Greenberg seems to take for granted that the goals of the movement are laudable and so he focuses instead on the foibles of the leaders as the main ethical problem facing the movement.
It does seem that the purpose of WikiLeaks and Openleaks are well-intended, but I see where you’re coming from. Once the door is opened by true online activists, like Julian Assange, who is to say that amateurs won’t start leaking information that shouldn’t be leaked!