25C3 - 1.4.2.3

25th Chaos Communication Congress
Nothing to hide

Speakers
wikileaks
Schedule
Day Day 4 (2008-12-30)
Room Saal 1
Start time 14:00
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 2916
Event type lecture
Track Society
Language used for presentation en
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Wikileaks

Wikileaks vs. the World

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. In the past year, Wikileaks has publicly revealed more sensitive military documents than the entire world's press combined. Its mission has been quite successful after the launch, spawning reportage worldwide and effectively helping to bring about reform on important matters based on factual information. As of now the effort has spawned thousands of press references in major newspapers like The NY Times, The Guardian and the BBC, and tens of thousands in blog posts.

We will talk about experiences that have been made within the first year of its operation, the impact activities on Wikileaks had in various parts of the globe, technical, political and legal challenges faced as well as give an overview of the state of classic and internet media today. We will also talk about conclusions we can derive from these experiences and will present strategies on how investigative journalism, and therefore the fourth estate as the only truly independent control over the state and our future might be resurrected. Lastly we will address why your involvement and that of the technical community is inherently important to ensuring free and uncensored access to information in the future. During the year of operation we have been able to make many different observations on the state of free information on the internet, the media, governments, military and corporations. We have observed how material that is published is being picked up, sued for, digested, hyped or ignored, and these observations, whether legal, behavioral or qualitative, lead to insights and conclusions that we would like to present and discuss.

Especially we have found the 4th estate as 'the' supposedly independent control over the state, inherently important to any society and its development, is clinically dead, bankrupt and headed in a dangerous direction. While the number of reportage is increasing with bloggers and other new media, the number of genuine reportage, let alone investigative journalism, is rapidly decreasing. This today goes in hand with censorship even in the free world and its media becoming daily routine and increasingly easy. Wikileaks has developed mechanisms that can actively help to address this problem and as has been proven from experience, lead to change and reform. We have found these mechanisms and others in their effectiveness only depend on the awareness and involvement of the public, on our all 'making use of them'. We want to present these findings in an effort to further this awareness and involvement, especially in the technical community that possesses a lot of the power to shape these important facets of our technologically-driven society, and so in some respect might carry a certain responsibility towards the future of our world.

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