Whistle-blowing sites like Wikileaks and the most recent disclosures by Edward Snowden concerning the “PRISM/TEMPORA” surveillance scandal have sparked a major public debate about the value of transparency for society and politics. Numerous projects (Open Data, vroniplag, lobbyplag, etc.) have benefited from the attention generated by this debate and have had a direct social impact, e.g. initiating a public debate on personal control of information and propagating the use of encryption technology. What these projects have in common is that they operate decentralised, make collective and loosely-related working contexts possible, digitally process large amounts of data and present them in an understandable way, and serve as a necessary corrective in shadowy political processes. It is high time to take an international, comparative perspective and investigate the status of discourse on the big story of transparency.
About the speakers
Jacob Appelbaum is an American Internet activist and specialist for computer security. As a hacker and programmer, he became known for his involvement in developing the anonymisation network Tor, as well as for his work for WikiLeaks. Appelbaum, who in his own words grew up in a family of ‘complete nutcases’, once remarked in an interview in Rolling Stone that the Internet is the only reason he is alive today.
Follow Appelbaum on Twitter: @ioerror
Christoph Bieber is a professor of Ethics in Political Management at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His main areas of research are political communication and new media, Internet and democracy and comparative political studies. He is a founding board member of pol-di.net e.V, the organisation responsible for operating Politik-digital.
Follow Bieber on Twitter: @drbieber
Micah L. Sifry is an American network expert and co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, which examines the impact of technical developments on political processes. He works as an editor for the award-winning blog techPresident and teaches at the Harvard Kennedy Law School. He is the author of numerous books and is particular known for his work “WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency” (2011).
Sifry on Twitter: @Mlsif
It is time for new openings