Heather Brooke, the campaigning journalist and writer who won a high court case against the House of Commons for the full disclosure of MPs’ second homes allowances (so I suspect you can guess her stance on all this) has written a very interesting article in yesterdays Guardian. As you might expect, there has been a lot of noise in the press regading the bombshell Wikileaks dropped last Sunday, so its quite possible this might get lost in all that noise. I’ll not repeat it all, instead, I’ll pull out a few choice quotes so that you get the flavour of its content and then give you a link so that you can read it all …
The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn’t sharing information that had put the nation’s security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous “lost opportunities” to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself …
…But data has a habit of spreading …
…when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don’t care much. Our privacy is expendable…
…much of the “harm” is embarrassment and the highlighting of inconvenient truths…
…Much of the outrage about WikiLeaks is not over the content of the leaks but from the audacity of breaching previously inviable strongholds of authority….
…when politicians speak of a threat to “national security”, often what they mean is that the security of their own position is threatened….
…Will we move to a New Information Enlightenment or will the backlash from those who seek to maintain control no matter the cost lead us to a new totalitarianism? What happens in the next five years will define the future of democracy for the next century…
If its catches your interest as it did mine, then surf on over to Guardian article here to read it all.