Wikileaks and the limits of protocol

In this chapter, I reflect on Wikileaks and its use of technology to achieve freedom in capitalist society. Wikileaks represents an avant-garde form of media (i.e. networked, cryptographic), with traditional democratic values: opposing power and seeking the truth. At times, http://wikileaks.org appears broken and half abandoned and at other times, it is clearly operating beyond the level of government efficiency and military intelligence. It has received both high acclaim and severe criticism from human rights organisations, the mainstream media and governments. It is a really existing threat to traditional forms of power and control yet, I suggest, it is fundamentally restrained by liberal ideology of freedom and democracy and the protocological limits of cybernetic capitalism

Reprogramming the World: Cyberspace and the Geography of Global Order

We live in a world of “fake news”, data breaches, election hacking, and cyberwarfare. We live in a world in which 280 characters can change everything. Our analog past has been replaced with digital realities. The world itself is being reprogrammed. This statement might seem like a quippy metaphor, but it actually reveals something much more concrete. The central claim of this book is that digital technologies are rewiring the way that society understands and thinks about global order as Cyberspace changes the content of international borders. Understanding these developments is critical to understanding the future of global society

Extensiones del marco traslocal en protestas en red: el caso del hashtag #idlenomore

The aim of the present study was to examine how locally situated social movements can use social media to deploy translocally networked forms of protests. The study looks at the Canadian Idle No More movement, an indigenous and environmental grassroots initiative that emerged around the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 as a reaction to previous neglect of indigenous groups and to the omnibus bill proposal C-45 (which threatened both the partial sovereignty of indigenous territories and the Canadian environment). Focusing on the -decentralized and heterogeneous- movement’s Twitter use in general, and the employment of the hashtag #idlenomore in particular, the study examines to which extent and how Twitter may be a means for establishing bonds between geographically dispersed social movements.El objetivo del presente estudio es examinar cómo movimientos sociales locales pueden usar formulas de protesta traslocal en red. El estudio trata sobre el movimiento canadiense “Idle No More”, una iniciativa medioambiental indígena de base que emerge a finales del 2012 y principios de 2013 como reacción a la marginación de los grupos indígenas y a la propuesta de ley “omnibus” C-45 (que amenazaba tanto la soberanía de los territorios indígenas como el medioambiente canadiense). En relación con el habitualmente descentralizado y heterogéneo uso de Twitter , y en particular, con la forma de emplear el hashtag #idlenomore, el estudio examina en qué medida y cómo Twiter puede ser una forma de establecer lazos entre movimientos sociales dispersos geográficamente

Partisan narratives on the 2016 US presidential election: a critical geopolitical analysis of Russian interference

As the Cold War drew to a close, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck coined the concept of reflexive modernization to describe the structural risks inadvertently produced by modernity’s progress. Through the approach of critical geopolitics, such risks radically began to transform traditional understanding of space and territory, allegedly deterritorializing traditional spatial structures, such as nation-states. However, scholars maintain that the process of reterritorialization, defined as the “inscription of new boundaries” reattaching space to “newly imagined visions of state, territory, and community,” cyclically follow deterritorialization (Albert 1991, 61; Ó Tuathail 1996, 230). Nevertheless, few scholars in the field of International Relations (IR), have seriously analyzed the process of reterritorialization. However, following the 2016 US presidential election, popular discourse in the US on Russian interference appeared to reterritorialize previously deterritorialized space, such as cyber and information space, by likening Russian hacks, leaks and collusion to the violation of the sovereign territory of the US. Thus, this thesis aims to research how US popular discourse reterritorializes Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, while comparing and contrasting the partisan narratives constructed in light of the political polarization of the US in recent years. To achieve this goal, a discourse analysis is conducted on storylines from 30 online news articles, from three right-wing and three left-wing media outlets. As hypothesized, the analysis confirms that both partisan narratives reterritorialize previously deterritorialized risks associated with reflexive modernization, transcribe the storylines into traditional US geopolitical culture, and call for assertive measures towards Russia which violated US territory, as well as towards internal Others, which weakened US territory.http://www.ester.ee/record=b5147583*es

Endarkened Governance: A Genealogical Analysis of the Pentagon Papers and The Global Intelligence Files

Using Stratfor\u27s intelligence networks and geopolitical analytics, StratCap, an Emerging Markets/Global Macro Hedge Fund, holds a competitive financial market advantage. This analysis of WikiLeaks\u27 The Global Intelligence Files contrasts the Pentagon Papers\u27 Public Statements and Internal Documents of the Kennedy administration. A Foucaultian genealogical approach exposes a development in governance beyond neoliberalism, entitled `state market-security.\u27 This is contextualized under an info-politics model. Overall, governmentality cannot accurately reveal both data sets, but merging endarkened governance (de Lint, 2004, 2008) into its framework can. This constitutes invisible practices administered by states and corporate security agencies that reveal secrecy-bureaucracies. Thus, how do the data sets reflect the practices of endarkened governance? Do welfarism and neoliberalism function to create the conditions for the disciplinarization and securitization of governance? This thesis argues that, in the securitization ethos, the practices and procedures of state market-security are best exposed through the analysis of endarkened governance texts

What People Leave Behind

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science. This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others

What People Leave Behind

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science. This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others

A TÉCNICA INFORMACIONAL COMO FERRAMENTA DE REDUÇÃO DA PRIVACIDADE NA REDE: ANÁLISE DO CASO WIKILEAKS

O presente artigo tem como foco analisar os impactos causados pelas tecnologias computacionais e informacionais, em especial a internet e suas ferramentas acessórias, sobre a privacidade humana, direcionando a abordagem para a atuação dos Estados e grandes corporações do ramo digital, estes expostos nas denúncias produzidas pelo site “Wikileaks”. Parte-se, portanto, de uma análise da técnica computacional, sua velocidade de expansão e suas bases fundantes, visando compreender as dinâmicas de poder que se engendram através da internet e as suas diferenças quando comparadas com o poder exercido no “domínio dos átomos”, para assim encaminhar à abordagem das manifestações de poder enquanto violações à privacidade voltadas à estruturação de meios de controle e vigilância. O trabalho em questão tem como paradigma metodológico, em um primeiro momento, o método dedutivo, partindo de concepções teóricas gerais para compreender a dinâmica de forças na internet e, durante a abordagem da situação prática, o método indutivo, demonstrando por meio do caso paradigmático como tais forças atuam sob o manto da alegalidade, propondo concepções convergentes com as sínteses obtidas dedutivamente. Importante ressaltar que há a adoção da revisão bibliográfica de obras, artigos e notícias relacionadas ao tema como suporte à metodologia optada. Palavras-chave: internet. Wikileaks. privacidade. vigilância