Re: <nettime> CONFERENCE ?OPEN KNOWLEDGE, FREE C ULTURE? at Royal University of Phnom Penh, Departmen t of Media and Communication

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

The laudable purpose of the conference might well be tempered by the
rapid exploitation of open knowledge developments by the globe's
spying enterprises -- governmental, commercial and individual.

For an example of the premier governmental open knowledge spying
enterprise see a solicitation announcement inviting bids by higher
education institutions by the US Director of National Intelligence
entitled 'Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination," December 22, 2009:

http://cryptome.org/dni-kdd.pdf

For the premier commercial open knowledge spying enterprises see
Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Yandex and copycats galore.

For the premier individual spying enterprises see the thousands of
spiders and bots operated without ethical or moral constraint to grab
the fruits of laborers hosting unrestricted web sites. These overlap
and in some cases are identical to the governmental, commercial and
educational siphons and bots who gluttonously bot and siphon one
another.

Common characteristics of these spying enterprises are:

1. They are asymmetrical in taking but not giving in equal measure.

2. They are insatiable, frantically gulping nutrients and garbag
indiscriminately, presuming bulk more valuable than selectivity.

3. They do not explain to the purpose of their compilations, instead
offer platitudes, "do no evil" each proclaim.

4. All are secretive about lack of full public disclosure.

5. All avow a public benefit purpose but do not demonstrate that
purpose by their disclosure policy and practice.

6. All use technological and legal obfuscation to conceal their
operations, while employing the same for predation.

7. All exploit public trust and loudly advertise the opposite.

To be sure, a cynic will note that the public benefit racket has
forever used these deceptive methods, cloaked itself in high-minded
rationales, fostered self-serving careers and agendas, relied
upon a host of apologists to camouflage ill intentions, promoted
narrow-minded, evil and murderous ideologies from pinnacles of
privilege and costumed finery, recruited adherents with baubles of
fools gold, and promulgated elaborate accusations of perfidy by others
to divert attention from deeper guilt.

Even the open knowledge initiative has come to have an odor of
trickery: give unto us sponsors of open fora your best and brightest,
for that we give you a platform wired to the max for data gathering,
name-taking, CV archiving, biometric data filing, siphoning laptop
contents, sexual entrapment, the panoply of unctuousnesses.

What better means for this than the open Internet tease, following the
leadership of disinterested scholarshop (C) wherein truth is obtained
by hammer blows of open discourse -- the biggest hammer prevails.








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