<nettime> Crowd Funding the Right to Know

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

Crowd Funding the Right to Know
Posted: 12/16/2012 11:38 pm

Daniel Ellsberg and John Perry Barlow
HuffPo, http://tinyurl.com/cftyrye

"A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press must be 
suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater 
values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." -- 
Judge Murray Gurfein, Pentagon Papers case, June 17, 1971

In December 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing a selection of leaked 
U.S. State Department cables through the New York Times, the Guardian, 
and other traditional media, opening a deep crack in the thickening wall 
of secrecy that has been forming worldwide around the internal processes 
of democracy since 9/11. They helped catalyze the "Arab Spring." They 
struck a blow for the right of citizens everywhere to know what is being 
done in our names. And they thoroughly freaked out the U.S. Government, 
sending it into a security spasm of Cold War proportions.

It reminded us strongly of another era, when one of us, Daniel Ellsberg, 
was called "the most dangerous man in America" by the White House and 
prosecuted for revealing to the American people what was really going on 
in Vietnam. Efforts to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers ended 
when the Supreme Court declared that the government cannot censor the 
media from publishing truthful information in the public interest, even 
if it's classified.

Thus, had the government tried to stop WikiLeaks in court, they would 
have failed. But they didn't have to. Instead, two individuals, Sen. Joe 
Lieberman and Rep. Peter King simply took it upon themselves to defund 
the truth. They successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard, Bank of 
America, and PayPal to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks, costing 
it 95 percent of its funding overnight.

When the private financial embargo was imposed on WikiLeaks, it was an 
act of censorship on them and on everyone who wanted to support their 
work. But against this extrajudicial sanction, there was no avenue of 
appeal. Even though Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced that 
there were no legal grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks, that didn't matter. 
Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, and PayPal are private 
corporations. They can do as they please. The closest thing they have to 
a Bill of Rights is a terms of service agreement no one reads.

While the Internet has broadly enabled those who would increase 
institutional transparency and accountability, responsible revelation 
requires more than the ability to dump documents online. Editorial 
processes are required to separate signal from noise and to expose the 
guilty without endangering the innocent. It takes actual journalism and 
actual journalism takes money.

We believe that not only does WikiLeaks need to survive, it must be 
joined by an array of others like it, edited transparency media that 
have so far failed to emerge, self-censoring victims of the chilling 
effects of the WikiLeaks blockade. Moreover, the watchdogs that do exist 
struggle for backers as brave as they are. The old media fear the fears 
of their advertisers. The new ones often depend on a few large 
foundations or donors, who, being from the elite themselves, may 
hesitate to part its curtains.

The answer, we believe, is to crowd-fund transparency, making it easy 
and relatively anonymous for the public to support the best watchdogs in 
one place, setting up a kind of United Way for the Truth.

To that end, a group of us that also includes Glenn Greenwald, Xeni 
Jardin, John Cusack, and Laura Poitras are launching The Freedom of the 
Press Foundation. Our goal is to collect deductible donations for a 
changing suite of scrappy public-interest organizations -- both new and 
existing -- focused on exposing mismanagement, cruelty, corruption, 
repression, and criminality in our increasingly opaque institutions.

Our first bundle of beneficiaries -- in addition to the 
still-beleaguered WikiLeaks -- will include MuckRock News, which 
streamlines Freedom of Information Act requests so that ordinary people 
can file them easily, The National Security Archive, which has been 
prying open the black boxes of classified information for years, and The 
UpTake, a combative Midwestern collective of citizen journalists focused 
on bringing transparency to state and local governments.

We hope our financial support and technical assistance will inspire a 
host of other edited and secure conduits for anonymously-provided 
documents that the citizens whose lives and liberties they impact have a 
natural right to see.

These channels are needed more than ever. In 2011, the U.S. Government 
classified over 92 million documents, four times more than were 
classified under George Bush in 2008. Moreover, President Obama's 
Justice Department has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the 
Espionage Act than all the previous administrations combined.

When a government becomes invisible, it becomes unaccountable. To expose 
its lies, errors, and illegal acts is not treason, it is a moral 
responsibility. Leaks become the lifeblood of the Republic.

Whatever one's opinion of WikiLeaks, every American should be offended 
that two elected officials, merely by putting pressure on corporations, 
could financially strangle necessary expression without ever going to 
court. What happened to WikiLeaks is completely unacceptable in a 
democracy that values free speech and due process.

We intend to assure that it can't happen again.





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