To be successful, a campaign to maintain the free internet and freedom of information has to go beyond vandal hackers. Stunts designed not to provoke… - Heather Brooke

The point about digitization, just to explain what I mean by that, is the way that information is no longer a physical commodity. It doesn't have a mass like it used to. So it used to be that if you wanted to leak a bunch of documents, you physically had to carry away these huge boxes of documents and then you had to physically photocopy them somehow. And they had this physical mass, and it was through that mass that they could be controlled by people in power. When information is digitized, it loses that mass for the most part. It becomes almost ephemeral, it's like an idea; it's like a thought. And it spreads and it can be shared almost instantaneously. So you can take that, and then you combine it with the internet, which is this web in which everybody is talking to each other and sharing information. And you've got the makings of what I think is a digital revolution, which nobody quite knows how to handle it, what to do with it.

Transparency strengthens democracy only when it gives citizens information they can use. It is not just about politicians telling us what they want us to know. For it to mean anything, it must empower citizens and provide answers to the questions they ask, not merely spoon feed them meagre information rations.

The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future.