metaprogramming and politics

Today i saw a woman’s german article on how she wouldn’t want reports about her sex life spread through wikileaks. I wouldn’t like that either. But i see it as a misconception and confusion about two very different issues, namely personal privacy and state/government secrecy. This confusion is used and increased by many politicians for their own purposes.

Privacy means our rights to have a private life, private flat, private actions and private communications. We don’t want the state or the public to surveil us or intrude our private world unless they can show evidence to an independent court that there is something criminal going on.

State secrecy denotes making secret deals, performing secret communication with and secret actions against people or other states. Secret actions can naturally not be discussed in the public and are exempt from our judgement when electing officials. Increasing state secrecy very quickly leads to inner circles wielding great power. The 20th century has tons of bad examples.

Therefore I refuse the notion that if am positive about privacy i must also be ok with state secrecy. Or if i want a transparent government that i also must be ok with total surveillance of my private life. No way. Likely it’s rather true that the more transparent a government is the more secure i can feel with respect to my privacy.

On a sidenote, this all relates to a point in the hacker ethics made by Wau Holland and the Chaos Computer Club a long time ago: “Make public data available, protect private data.”

Paypal “restricts” the bank account of the german Wau Holland foundation which managed parts of Wikileaks transactions. Citing from their statement :

PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to
a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that
our payment service cannot be used for any activities that
encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in
illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.

As with my yesterday notes a number of questions arise. What exactly is
illegal about wikileaks behaviour in the US? Was money laundering or
online fraud involved? Was wikileaks given a warning and asked to
provide clarifying statements regarding the usage of _their_ money? Do
they apply the same moral standards to all their customers and accounts?
For example, are they also closing all accounts related to the
Washington Times or related to Sarah Palin publically calling for
assasination of a citizen of Australia?

If we are learning anything from the Wikileaks case it is the willfullness
of young IT companies in the US to concur with public opinion or direct
government pressure. Up until now i presumed the likes of Amazon or Paypal
also incorporated some ethics. And this would mandate IMO to keep
distance to government actions and to resist government pressure especially
if it’s about something like wikileaks. It seems like the US goverment
used its advanced notice of the pending publication wisely: rather than filtering critical
messages they organised a huge campaign in the US resulting in Amazon,
PayPal and everydns and probably others to implement government policies
and quickly. No need to have special laws or evil government actions – just reference the Terms of Use and be done.