El pasado 30 de septiembre, durante el acto de investidura como Doctor
Honoris Causa en nuestra Universidad, el maestro Tom Wilson captó la
atención de todos los presentes (y de los medios de comunicación
especialmente) cuando hizo este comentario un poco antes de terminar su
discurso de investidura. Os lo extracto y si alguien desea el discurso
completo se lo puedo hacer llegar por mail.
saludos
Francisco Javier Martínez Méndez
Universidad de Murcia
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Increasingly, however, communities and societies are demanding that
secrecy be limited to what is genuinely related to national security,
rather than what is related to, for example, the relationships between
business and government, between governments and dictators, and within
and between corporations seeking to hide, for example, the conditions
under which their products are made.
In recent months, the Website Wikileaks has been much in the news
because of its release of 75,000 files relating to the war in
Afghanistan. The founder of the site, Julian Assange, has been damned by
the neo-conservatives in the USA as having 'blood on his hands', while
others praise him for revealing to the public what the public ought to
know about what is being done in its name.
The very existence of Wikileaks and its success in uncovering
information, while protecting its sources, demonstrates the plausibility
of the slogan, /Information wants to be free/, which is attributed to
the hacker Stephen Brand. The state's desire to keep information secret
might be described as Orwellian and it is ironic that Brand used the
phrase at a conference in /1984. / But we can also see that there are
those who do not want information to be free, in this sense; witness the
sexual harassment slur on the founder of Wikileaks which happened just
last month.
Limits to the free communication of ideas also result from the tendency
towards monopoly structures in the communication media. One only has to
think of Berlusconi's control of a significant proportion of the media
in Italy, or the not so obvious connection in France between Sarkozy and
those friends of his who control the media. In the UK, the dominance of
Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV, as well as his ownership of newspapers,
threatens the free flow of opposing ideas.
If the only information the citizen has is that provided either by the
political class or by business interests, _/*how is democracy possible?*/_
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