What would an alternative Social Networking platform to Facebook look like. How would it respect its users´ right for privacy and allow them to self-control their data over the long term? What would its architecture be and how could people help to improve it? So far, no other project has engaged as intensively into this terrain as the team behind Diaspora*.

Maxwell Salzberg, one of the founders, tells the story of how he and his friends got involved in this project of a “personally controlled, do-it-all, open-source social network” after a talk by FSF lawer Eben Moglen at their university in New York. He answers questions about their technical infrastrucutre, first problems they have been run into and many more. “Our goal is to empower people with their data.”

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Lars Palmgren from Gothenburg interviews the Member of Icelandic Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir from the new Icelandic party The Movement to talk about the financial warfare that has been taking place against the people of Iceland since the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic in September-October 2008 broke out.
The governments of London, the Hague and the EU have been,- with the backing of the IMF -, at the heart of what she calls a this `financial blackmail´.

The online whistleblower platform Wikileaks proved to be essential for Icelanders to know about the happenings in the background. This has led Birgitta Jonsdottir and others to develop the most progressive press law of the world, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (immi.is). It is already playing a crucial role in the current attempts for a...

In 2008, literary scholar Johannes Ullmaier was invited to speak at the annual meeting of Chaos Computer Club. As his topic, he chose the personal journal written by German anarchist and poet Erich Mühsam (6 April 1878 – 10 July 1934), and the way it was used against him by the authorities after Mühsam’s incarceration in 1919.

In his talk, Ullmaier interprets the historical facts as foreboding characteristics of a ‘stone age of surveillance’, which allows him to draw parallels to contemporary legislation on privacy and surveillance in Germany.