This excerpt is to focus on the how Wikileaks and information in the Internet society is changing how the individual can take classified information and share it to the public.

The Huffington Post is an internet newspaper available to anyone who has access to the internet. It offers syndicated columnists, blogs and news stories with moderated comments.  On February 9, 2011 The Huffington Post released an exclusive excerpt focused on Wikileaks, Assange and how information cannot be kept private anymore.  Micah L. Sifry is a co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, which covers the ways in which technology is changing politics. With his input, Micah hopes to train organizations, people, political parties, etc. to adapt and thrive in a networked world. Micah L. Sifry wanted to be able to raise awareness of this possibility of highly important information breaches with the internet. In this excerpt from his book, “WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency,” Micah first addressed the story of Assange and Wikileaks. Within this age of sharing information from one individual to the rest of the world, Wikileaks raised concern of being able to spread information in a public forum with information that should only have been seen or told by few people. Wikileaks, is an international self-described not-for-profit organization that publishes top-secret and classified information from anonymous sources, leaked news sources, etc. Unlike Wikipedia, which is a public forum and a true wiki- A website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users- Wikileaks takes information from others but leaves the editing and correcting of information anonymous. Therefore, yes, Wikileaks is an area in which people can publish information and is not controlled per say by one individual, but also that the individual now has more power in providing the “truth” to something.

Sifry’s main point is this: that although Wikileaks has unveiled information that should not have been discovered by the general public, “WikiLeaks is just one piece of a much larger continuum of changes in how the people and the powerful relate to each other in this new time–changes that are fundamentally healthy for the growth and strength of an open society.”  I think that now our society does have to face the truth that our information, whatever we leave on the internet, is out there for everyone to see, and as we continue forward, we will find ourselves facing even more privacy breaches. Sifry states, “It both helps and hurts that we are living in a time of radical uncertainty about the “official” version of the truth.” I agree with this statement that we are now bending the truth, but at the same time providing different perspectives on the truth. It is now up to us to really sift through all of the information to understand the real truth of something. With this transparency, we are opening up our personal lives to the world, it’s just are we as a society, and as individuals, ready for it?