So the sentence for Chelsea Manning is 35 years. The intention of government here is obvious: like everything else in the ridiculously harsh treatment of Manning it is an attempt to deter others from leaking information. So is the detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner under the Terrorism Act in the UK and the destruction of computer equipment at the Guardian’s offices. The game plan is clearly to intimidate any potential leakers and anyone who might help them.
This is an extraordinarily dangerous path for society. It is the government version of the music industry fighting both musicians and listeners. In the case of music it was a about profits and in the case of government it is about power. With the cost of copying / disclosing vast amounts of music / data at zero, the efforts to fight such copying / disclosing become ever more draconian. They are ultimately futile but not before causing massive collateral damage.
Why do I claim these efforts are ultimately futile? Because this is the very nature of digital information. There is *no way* to have frictionless access and protection at the same time. People will again point to encryption and I will continue to point out that encryption is based on keys which themselves are digital pieces of information and can hence be copied with ease at *any level* in the system (eg your disk driver). There will be no secret digital information just like there will be no non-copyable digital information (see also my previous posts).
Given what is at stake here, I am surprised by how overall apathetic the general public reaction appears to be. When government feels it can lock people up for 35 years without proof of material harm and intimidate journalists who are informing the public about government excess, then the very foundations of democratic society are at stake: freedom of speech, freedom of press, due process, no unreasonable punishment (basically the Bill of Rights). Instead of shrugging our shoulders, we should be protesting much more loudly than we did with PIPA and SOPA.
