[LINK] "Information doesn't want to be free, people do"

[rfmcdonald]

At Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Charli Carpenter is skeptical about the argument that social networking systems and the Internet help civil society form in repressive societies, on the grounds that the assumption of privacy is problematic.

[I]] the off-cited "boomerang effect" this [prviate] communication often crosses boundaries and involves dissidents within one country seeking alliances with civil society networks and sympathetic governments abroad. The public sphere, in other words, is increasingly internationalized. The strategy of capturing and leaking digital evidence of such communications, while intended to hold governments to account, predictably produces blow-back effects on dissidents as well by exposing their connections with those governments abroad. Belarus and Zimbabwe are two recent country contexts where this allegations of this dynamic are coming to light.

Similarly, as privacy controls on social networking sites and laws protecting the privacy of text messages are increasingly whittled away, will this not dampen precisely the public sphere that translates social media into political power? As plausible as Assange's argument that transparency will hobble the ability of state bureaucracies to organize wrong-doing in secret is the threat that transparency will hobble citizens' ability to organize dissent and protest against the state. If so, strengthening laws, norms and media architecture to protect the right to control who can view and disseminate one's digital artifacts - be they governments, corporations or individuals - would perhaps be a more important step toward freedom than condemning information censorship. And this is an argument to be pitched not just at the US State Department but the wider elements in global civil society that want a rights-based internet architecture that works for people