"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."
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Political activistsWomen journalists from the United StatesWomen activists from the United StatesActivists from the United KingdomPeople from Pennsylvania
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Heather Brooke
Heather Rose Brooke (born 1970) is a British-American journalist and freedom of information campaigner. The author of Your Right to Know, The Silent State, Assange Agnosties and The Revolution Will Be Digitised, Brooke was a 2010 winner of the Washington Coalition for Open Government "Key Award". Also known as the pioneer who forced the British Parliament to answer to its own freedom of information laws.
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