44 quotes
By making everything secure [governments] have degraded the quality of secrecy.
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It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.
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I get it. It is always easier to go after the person raising a problem than to deal with the problem itself, especially if that problem is systemic.
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The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future.
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The movement of radical transparency and accountability is not about putting a new person in charge, it’s about getting rid of the whole idea of hierarchal politics. It’s about decentralizing power.
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I want to put paid to this idea that if you've nothing to fear, you've nothing to hide.
Attributed Chatham House Talk (2011)
This is the information war we are now engaged in. Governments are seeking to militarise cyberspace while citizens fight for the right to communicate and assemble freely online without state surveillance.
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Knowing how public money is spent by public officials seemed the bare minimum for a functioning democracy.
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Secrecy, in the hands of the powerful, is too easy a tool to abuse. The distance from protection to cover-up is short, and a tool initially intended to help can quickly morph into causing harm. That’s why it should never be a default for anyone in power, but rather an exception.
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We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.
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What I call the ‘information war’, where through the control of information our society is being radically transformed.
Attributed Chatham House Talk (2011)
Even when transparency reveals uncomfortable truths, it is still the better path. Problems don’t disappear when buried - they deepen.
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The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest.
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It was that whole Wizard of Oz moment. We all look at these politicians – oh wow, they're so powerful - and then it was the little dog pulling the curtain away.
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There doesn’t seem to be any law that’s there to protect the citizens from massive State surveillance. We have to collectively come up with some fundamental values around people’s right to privacy, the right to be left alone from government, and rights to free speech.
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This is the problem with the argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear: it ignores the issue of power. If we are not careful, transparency can be used to increase, rather than reduce, the information asymmetry between ruler and ruled.
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Journalists are, or ought to be, the public's hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distil it to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It's also the reason why anyone would choose well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog.
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To be successful, a campaign to maintain the free internet and freedom of information has to go beyond vandal hackers. Stunts designed not to provoke dialogue or persuade the public of the rightness of the cause but simply to throw up a middle finger to authority are more hindrance than help.
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Transparency can help citizens hold the powerful to account; but it can also be used by the powerful to control citizens by making their lives transparent through surveillance. For transparency to be just, it must always be considered in relationship to power.
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Transparency helps ensure that power is not abused or used to make the powerful, or their immediate families, rich. There is also a genuine public interest in ensuring that the people who make laws and levy tax are following those laws and paying their fair share of tax.
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