Writer, Andy Greenberg
Andy Greenberg is a regular writer for Forbes with a focus on privacy, technology, and information security. His most recent work is This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hactivists Aim to Free the World’s Information, a book that depicts the development of information leaks. Greenberg explains that from its beginnings, technology has both created a more open culture, but also allowed for more secrets. His world of cypherpunks and hacktivists is one in which these cyber-hippies attempt to uncover institutionalized secrecy.
An excerpt of This Machine Kills Secrets, hosted on Wired Magazine’s website, portrays a vignette of the elite hacktivist society. At the “Camp”, or Chaos Communication Camp, hackers gather in East Germany to band together for a hacktivism conference of sorts. During this particular Camp gathering Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a key player in the original WikiLeaks project, attempts to lead a team to release the WikiLeaks spin-off, Open Links. Domscheit-Berg’s brain child would take WikiLinks to another plane. Rather than simply releasing leaked information to the public, the site would be access-only to major players in the activism game. The information would be encrypted and released only to parties deemed need-to-know.
The site is ultimately unsuccessful simply because the hackers could not get it up and running. Also, the idea received a fair amount of criticism from the Camp’s attendees and from WikiLeaks’ face Julian Assange. The camp is full of internet’s celebrities, which are often faceless and nameless. The secretiveness of the underground internet society makes it seem almost elite. Not only does the internet community appear elite, but also deeply political in its own way. The rivalry between Assange and Domscheit-Berg appears almost childish, with each respective pot calling the kettle black. The egos of each brilliant man seem to have gotten in the way of what was once a common goal: worldwide democratic revolution via technology. Instead, creative differences have created a divide within the hacktivism community. While the cyber-hippie culture may have good intentions, the divisiveness may be something they have to work on.
2 responses to “The WikiLeaks Spinoff That Wasn’t”