The first infowar has started
“The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” – John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The first infowar has started. Wikileaks’s disclosures of confidential documents from the Pentagon and the State Department have triggered an aggressive reaction from those sources that want to keep us ignorant of their manipulations of societies, public opinions, governments >> us. In only a few days, Wikileaks’s .org domain has been cancelled, Amazon has closed Wikileaks’s web space and Paypal has frozen Wikileaks’s account. These actions are not only against Wikileaks. These are all attacks on all of us. They are attempts of stopping us of getting the information that’s ours, information that concerns all of us.
How a government, how a company can be legitimated to stop me of knowing that a foreign government is manipulating the justice system of my country to stop my fellow citizens to get justice for the murder of an honest man, a professional journalist, a brother, a son? How can we let them stop us from knowing that a foreign country is blackmailing my government to pass a law written by its big media companies? How do we allow them to stop anybody from knowing the injustices, the blackmail, the conspirations that elites are playing on all of us? Before we could have an excuse: we couldn’t be certain. Now there is no excuse. We shall not let them.
This is not a conventional war. It’s wage in the physical and in the virtual world. The infowarriors are not professional soldiers trained to kill, but citizens, like you and me, who can use their resources at hand to wage war on those that have manipulated us for so long. A war in which our principal weapon is information. Anybody, anyone who knows something, even the tiniest particle of information, has a weapon that can help one side or the other. Your eyes, your ears, your camera, your phone, your computer are your weapons. If you know something, share it. Alone it’s worthless, connected it’s powerful.
Their power is centralised. It comes from concentrating together economic and coercive resources. If the centre is gone, their power is gone. Our power is distributed. It comes from the networks we form. It comes from the spontaneous aggregation of the grains of our small actions. It comes from our capacity to act unexpectedly and strongly, and be quickly gone, letting our target confused, not knowing from where we came from. It comes from having millions of heads, and millions of bodies. We have what we need. If we want, we can.
