Global Context
Within the last decade, we have seen the rise of the digital era affect the world entirely. Recently, we have seen hacktivism against the government and informational data mining from the government within the last year alone. In June 2013, news outlets The Guardian and The Washington Post shocked the world with their article revealing the NSA was collecting information from foreigners in the U.S. and around the world using a program code named: PRISM. This program, to put in simple terms, collected data from various major sites (such as Google and Facebook) from their users as they uploaded them onto the web while at the same time targeted individuals that might be deemed as a terrorist. There was a huge global outcry, most notably from Brazil, Spain, and France. The documents leaked by Edward Snowden also revealed several other countries that assisted the U.S. with this project such as Great Britain and Israel (Lee 2013).
As well as within the last decade, the whistleblowing website known as WikiLeaks was introduced to the world by Australian hacker Julian Assange, a firm believer of the free movement of information. Although technically created in 1999, Assange formally launched the site in 2007. This site has leaked varied amount of information from businesses and governments worldwide. Most notably, it leaked the video of the “two US Apache helicopter pilots allegedly executing people on the ground in Iraq” (Lundberg 2011) and assisted Edward Snowden in releasing the documents revealing the existence of PRISM (Lee 2013).
As well as within the last decade, the whistleblowing website known as WikiLeaks was introduced to the world by Australian hacker Julian Assange, a firm believer of the free movement of information. Although technically created in 1999, Assange formally launched the site in 2007. This site has leaked varied amount of information from businesses and governments worldwide. Most notably, it leaked the video of the “two US Apache helicopter pilots allegedly executing people on the ground in Iraq” (Lundberg 2011) and assisted Edward Snowden in releasing the documents revealing the existence of PRISM (Lee 2013).