Posts Tagged ‘fiscal blockade’

Wikileaks, Napster, and the Ayatollah Flanagan

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks

Wikileaks and Napster

In an Assange interview published by the Guardian on Friday 3 December 2010,  Assange says:

“Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has …power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.”

In other words, he says the only Western speech that is ‘free’ is speech that does not threaten “the fiscal blockade”.

The commodity, in the case of Wikileaks, that is threatened is safe/private intelligence. We might call it ‘safely encrypted intelligence’.

The commodity in the case of Napster was monetized, commodified, marketed music.

Napster was savaged by the music industry because Napster represented a significant threat to the business. They were actually able to shut it down through the legal system. Wikileaks is being savaged by governments and also the media around the world. The media is savaging Wikileaks because Wikileaks is fulfilling a job typically done by the press. Governments are savaging Wikileaks because Wikileaks is publishing their secret information.

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