WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency: Micah Sifry explores the history, successes and failures of online transparency

Micah Sifry's WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at the promise and limits of Internet-based transparency efforts. Sifry looks at everything from digital sunshine laws to the Iranian election to Cablegate, and examines what has worked to make the world's governments and corporations more accountable and when technology-driven transparency efforts have failed. His postmortem on the Obama administration's largely abandoned transparency efforts are particularly sharp, especially in light of how much mileage the few successful government transparency projects delivered.

No book about transparency and politics would be complete without a look at Wikleaks and Julian Assange, and Sifry takes great pains to separate issues with Assange's personal life and management style from the power and danger of Wikileaks-style sites, as well as the power and risk of denial-of-service attacks like those staged under the Anonymous banner on Wikileaks' behalf.

This is more than an account of the successes and failures in online transparency: it's a kind of roadmap for activists who want to use the Web to make the powerful more accountable -- and who worry that technology might be used to hide a multitude of sins and cover them up with meaningless gestures towards transparency.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (Amazon)

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (OR Books)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Weren’t we supposed to have banking leaks by now? Did the banking cartel successfully scare them too?
- EH
  
  My sense is that that was a gambit. Nothing really had happened in response to WL releases before they said that, and once they did, well, we see what’s happened to Assange. It was a sacrifical illustration of the power involved and its priorities.
  
  I wouldn’t doubt that they do have something but that maybe the time still isn’t quite right, though, knowing that Wikileaks’ mission is to achieve the “maximum political impact.”
Toff

Sounds like a potentially interesting book. I can’t find the table of contents for it online though. Guess I’ll have to swing by some local bookstore that hasn’t yet shuttered (RIP Friar Tuck).
tcarb

Whatever the fall out from Wikileaks and the debate over transparency – it is sobering and shameful to observe the manner in which Brandon Manning has been treated since his arrest last summer.

Whether one considers his act one of treason or a of cry for truth, continued endorsement of his treatment is indicative of how inconvenient people can be buried alive in our “open societies”