PdF Live: A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom. PdFLeaks: Journalism, Free Speech, DDOS and Internet Freedom [UPDATED] Yesterday's symposium on Wikileaks and internet freedom was like a great jazz concert. We got an all-star array of great musicians who know how to play from a score that is being written in real-time; we heard many great solos, some improvised and some carefully planned in advance; and at times we even heard the ensemble start to gel like a well-rehearsed band. There were discordant notes too, and maybe not enough of them given how hard the music really is.
I highly recommend replaying the event (it's archived here in two parts) and paying close attention to what each speaker said; when you're listening in real-time and trying to also ingest and participate in the backchannel conversation on Twitter (or IRL, which made a quiet but great resurgence yesterday) it becomes hard to take it all in. Now, hopefully, there will be a continuation of the conversation online, here and on other blogs. A few thoughts to help move that ball forward. 1. 2. 3. More to come... Micah Sifry (Mlsif) Legitimate civil disobedience: Wikileaks and the layers of backlash | Deanna Zandt.
(Update/edit note, 12/15: If you, like me, tend not to read comments in general because they’re troll-fests, I suggest suspending your disbelief and reading the comments on this post. There’s an incredibly useful, thoughtful and productive discussion going on. With that, let me also say that I’m a tyrannical comment moderator and delete unproductive/trolling comments.) (Note: There are so many parts to the Wikileaks story that it’s almost impossible to cover them all–once you start to detangle one angle, you discover twenty more. Slip down that rabbit hole, and you’ll come out dizzier than when you went in. In any case, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive discussion of the entire topic, but to expand on a conversation sparked yesterday.) I attended Personal Democracy Forum’s symposium on Wikileaks yesterday–a fantastic lineup of speakers and attendees, gathered quickly to discuss one of the most complicated intersections of Internet and politics that we’ve seen in a while.
Civil disobedience. Overview[edit] By the 1850s, a range of minority groups in the United States--blacks, Jews, Seventh Day Baptists, Catholics, antiprohibitionists, racial egalitarians, and others--employed civil disobedience to combat a range of legal measures and public practices that to them promoted ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination. Public and typically peaceful resistance to public power would remain an integral tactic in modern American minority-rights politics.[11] Etymology[edit] Thoreau's 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government" was eventually renamed "Essay on Civil Disobedience. " After his landmark lectures were published in 1866, the term began to appear in numerous sermons and lectures relating to slavery and the war in Mexico.[12][13][14][15] Thus, by the time Thoreau's lectures were first published under the title "Civil Disobedience," in 1866, four years after his death, the term had achieved fairly widespread usage.
"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, Techniques[edit] PdFLeaks: Jay Rosen on Wikileaks and the Watchdog Web. Mapping the connections among the #wikileaks, #pdfleaks and #cablegate mentioning twitter populations with #NodeXL. On Saturday 11 December 2010 A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom ( was held in New York City. I did not attend in person, but the event was streamed live. A colleague of mine, Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc), a sociologist from the University of Maryland ebiquity group, did attend and spoke on the second panel of the day (her blog at Throughout the day it was an interesting discussion highlighting the many factors and facets of the release of diplomatic cables and more by Wikileaks. Here are some NodeXL generated maps of recent discussions around Wikileaks, pdfleaks, and cablegate in Twitter: These are the connections among the people who tweeted the term “wikileaks” on 11 December 2010.
The “wikileaks” account is at the center of the inner circle. It is surrounded by a collection of very lightly interconnected people (there is a low clustering coefficient) who retweet messages from the wikileaks account. 20101210-NodeXL-Twitter-wikileaks. NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel.