5.13.2013

A Challenge to the Digital Rights Community

One of the more surprising discoveries to emerge from The Conversation has been the invisibility of digital liberties to extremely well-informed thinkers outside of the digital liberties community. Only one interviewee of sixty mentioned them—James Bamford—and I invited him into the project specifically to cast light on digital liberties.

I'm hardly the most informed or eloquent proponent of digital liberties, but it's an issue I care about deeply and one that receives far too little attention, especially given its ramifications for other forms of activism. If digital liberties erode, so to do our possibilities for achieving any kind of healthy reform, whether in economics, environmental policy, or any number of other fields.

The digital liberties community is incredible and they are working tirelessly, often without recognition, to defend rights most of us don't even know we need. Yet I think they haven't done a good job of articulating how digital liberties relate to other, more visible concerns. So I wrote a friendly op-ed that challenged digital liberty activists to reframe their issue in a more accessible way and, luckily, Boing Boing published it.