Whistleblowing for Change

Front matter

TATIANA BAZZICHELLI (ED.) |

WAHISTLE- BLOWING FOR CHANG

EXPOSING SYSTEMS OF POWER AND4ANJUSTICE ranscri

Afterword

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a result of offline and online personal encounters, networked experiences, struggles and dreams. It would have not been possible without those who have blown the whistle in the past decades. My first and deepest thanks go therefore to the whistleblowers. Additionally, I would like to thank all the people who are continuing to put themselves at risk by telling the truth, supporting whistleblowers, advocating for whistleblowing, and informing about whistleblowing. There is still an enormous amount of work to be done legally, politically, technologically, and culturally, and I hope that this book will contribute to making their work more understood.

I would like to thank deeply all the people that wrote and were interviewed in this book, in alphabetical order: Magnus Ag, Barrett Brown, Brandon Bryant, Daryl Davis, Suelette Dreyfus, Naomi Colvin, Daniel Hale, Delphine Halgand-Mishra, Os Keyes, John Kiriakou, Simona Levi, Lisa Ling, Lauri Love, Annie Machon, Joana Moll, Anna Myers, Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer, Trevor Paglen, Lieke Ploeger, Laura Poitras, Denis “Jaromil” Roio, Robert Trafford, Christoph Trautvetter, Pelin Unker, Charlotte Webb, Cian Westmoreland, Billie Winner-Davis, and Theresa Ziiger. It is a privilege to have had the chance to get closer to their work and their lives.

To this list I would also add Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the team of WikiLeaks, whose determination in exposing systems of power has been an important inspiration for many in this field.

My deepest thanks go to my colleagues at the Disruption Network Lab, and in particular to Elena Veljanovska, who worked closely with me to make this book come to life. We spent a lot of time together reflecting on the subjects, carefully checking sentences, and running against time to be able to deliver this book according to plan. Her work as editorial coordinator was irreplaceable. Thank you from the depths of my heart also to Lieke Ploeger, with whom I share the adventure of running the Disruption Network Lab, who supported our work dealing with important matters of the Lab while we were too busy with our writing, and for her contribution in the final readings. A special thank you to Alannah Travers and Rebeka Veljanovska for their impeccable work of copy editing and proofreading, and to Jonas Frankki for his visionary graphic and unique work on the layout (and, on a personal note, for supporting me greatly in moments of doubt and through difficulties during the realisation of this book).

Thank you also to the other wonderful colleagues of the Disruption Network Lab: first of all Nada Bakr, working with her positive spirit and competences as project manager since 2017 and also contributing to the reading of the chapters

Acknowledgements of this book before going to print; Lorin Decarli, who has been advising us on legal matters; all the past and present team members of the Disruption Network Lab, who shaped its current state, especially Daniela Silvestrin, Kim Voss, Claudia Dorfmiiller and Monti Harmony.

It is difficult to thank all the people that contributed to making this book possible—therefore I apologise in advance for any of them missing in these pages. However, I feel the need to specifically thank some of them, because they contributed with their activities directly and indirectly, and have been central for the development of the networks of trust around the Disruption Network Lab for many years: Jacob Appelbaum, who understood the deep aims of my work since the first time we met in 2009, and shared with me both his great knowledge in the field and his friends—some of whom are also part of this book—and stimulated me to perfect my analytic work on this book; Renata Avila, who offered her help and skills in many situations through her ability to understand who is the right person for the right work in critical moments; Mustafa Al-Bassam, Serena Tinari, the Wau Holland Foundation, the Chelsea Manning Initiative Berlin, for similar reasons that they know; Mauro Mondello because we shared the curation of important conferences of the Disruption Network Lab, among them the most sensitive we ever organised, and probably many other difficult ones that will follow; Chantal Meloni, John Goetz and Laura Lucchini, because we shaped the contents of the first Disruption Network Lab conference in 2015; Tonje Hessen Schei and Gabriella Coleman, because they shared with me their networks of trust during the events they took part in; the staff of Transparency International, in particular Michael Hornsby and Eka Rostomashvili, for the long lasting cooperation with the Disruption Network Lab events since 2019; Annegret Falter and the Whistleblower- Netzwerk e.V. for their important work in Germany and the exchange we had at the beginning of our programme; Stefania Maurizi, Giovanni Pellerano, Rima Sghaier, and all the team of GlobaLeaks, Priscilla Robledo and Federico Anghelé of The Good Lobby Italia, for their knowledgeable partnership and the crucial work they do in the field of whistleblowing in Italy.

Last but not least, thank you to the team of transcript Verlag and all funders that believed in this book project: the Reva and David Logan Foundation; the Rudolf Augstein Foundation; the Open Society Initiative for Europe within the Open Society Foundations; Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Finally, thank you to all the people that will read this book and will contribute to shaping its future dissemination, by speaking about it or being inspired by it.

Tatiana Bazzichelli is founding board member and programme director of the Disruption Network Lab. Her focus of work is hacktivism, network culture, art, and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was curator at transmediale art & digital culture festival, where she developed the year-round programme “reSource transmedial culture Berlin”, and curated several conference events and workshops. She was a member of the Transparency International Anti-Corruption Award Committee 2020. From 2019 to 2021 she was appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German Federal Government together with the State of Berlin, and from 2020 jury member for the Kulturlichter prize, a new award for digital cultural education by the German Federal Government. She received a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Aarhus University in 2011, and she conducted her post-doctoral research at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Her PhD research, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, was the result of her 2009 visiting scholarship at the H-STAR Institute of Stanford University. She wrote the book Networking: The Net as Artwork (2006) and co-edited Disrupting Business: Art and Activism in Times of Financial Crisis (2013). She has taught classes on whistleblowing, hacktivism, art, and digital culture in many institutions, including the Department of Cultural Practice at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (FHP) as Visiting Lecturer in 2016-2017.