Scan barcode
quintusmarcus's review
5.0
Michael Sifry's Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency is the most comprehensive survey to date of the the various movements (of which Wikileaks is only a part) to open up and free, in the name of democracy, the closely guarded information held by various government and corporate entities. The first half of the book is a review of the growth of groups like the Personal Democracy Forum, the Sunlight Foundation, and others in the community of "politically minded hackers and technologically savvy activists". The author examines the early successes, both in the US and Great Britain, of crowd-sourced transparency efforts, and then broadens his view to global transparency efforts. But he also looks at citizen journalists, and the growing usefulness and importance of social media in the breaking of news stories. Sifry drives home that point that effective citizen journalism can quickly undermine government-propagated evasions and falsehoods."Transparency," he writes,"is a necessary corrective to excessive government power." In the final chapter, Sifry looks at the problems with Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, and carefully examines the multiple threats to the free distribution of information, ranging from government pressure on private providers like Google and Twitter to outright harassment and threats of legal action against transparency activists like Assange. The author concludes, "At a time when closed and powerful institutions like governments and corporations withhold so much information from us, and have so much information about us, it is vital that ordinary citizens should also have more information about them and what they do. More information...is our best defense against opacity and the bad behavior it can enable." Excellent, thoughtful, and timely book, highly recommended.
More...