leaking in Stalder 2018
circumstances outlined above are concerned, Bauman\'s
conclusion may seem justified. But as an overarching assessment of
things, it falls somewhat short, for every form of power provokes its
own forms of resistance.[^61^](#c3-note-0061){#c3-note-0061a} In the
context of post-democracy under the digital condition, these forms have
likewise shifted to the level of data, and an especially innovative and
effective means of resistance []{#Page_149 type="pagebreak"
title="149"}has been the "leak"; that is, the unauthorized publication
of classified documents, usually in the form of large datasets. The most
famous platform for this is WikiLeaks, which since 2006 has attracted
international attention to this method with dozens of spectacular
publications -- on corruption scandals, abuses of authority, corporate
malfeasance, environmental damage, and war crimes. As a form of
resistance, however, leaking entire databases is not limited to just one
platform. In recent years and through a variety of channels, large
amounts of data (from banks and accounting firms, for instance) have
been made public or have been handed over to tax investigators by
insiders. Thus, in 2014, for instance, the *Süddeutsche Zeitung*
(operating as part of the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists based in Washington, DC), was not only able to analyze the
so-called "Offshore Leaks" -- a database concerning approximately
122,000 shell companies registered in tax
havens[^62^](#c3-note-0062){#c3-note-0062a} -- but also the "Luxembourg
Leaks," which consisted of 28,000 pages of documents demonstrating the
existence of secret and extensive tax deals between national authorities
and multinational corporations and which caused a great deal of
difficulty for Jean-Claude Juncker, the newly elected preside
ists, to the public, so that the latter could
understand and judge what was taking
place.[^64^](#c3-note-0064){#c3-note-0064a} His leaks benefited from
technical []{#Page_150 type="pagebreak" title="150"}advances, including
the new forms of cooperation which have resulted from such advances.
Even institutions that depend on keeping secrets, such as banks and
intelligence agencies, have to "share" their information internally and
rely on a large pool of technical personnel to record and process the
massive amounts of data. To accomplish these tasks, employees need the
fullest possible access to this information, for even the most secret
databases have to be maintained by someone, and this also involves
copying data. Thus, it is far easier today than it was just a few
decades ago to smuggle large volumes of data out of an
institution.[^65^](#c3-note-0065){#c3-note-0065a}
This new form of leaking, however, did not become an important method of
resistance on account of technical developments alone. In the era of big
data, databases are the central resource not only for analyzing how the
world is described by digital communication, but also for generating
that communication. The power of networks in particular is organized
through the construction of environmental conditions that operate
simultaneously in many places. On their own, the individual commands and
instructions are often banal and harmless, but as a whole they
contribute to a dynamic field that is meant to produce the results
desired by the planners who issue them. In order to reconstruct this
process, it is necessary to have access to these large amounts of data.
With such information at hand, it is possible to relocate the
surreptitious operations of post-democracy into the sphere of political
debate -- the public sphe
leaking in Sollfrank 2018
i-Hub is an online service that processes requests for
pay-walled articles by providing systematic, automized, but unauthorized
backdoor access to proprietary scholarly journal databases. Users requesting
papers not present in LibGen are advised to download them through Sci-Hub; the
respective PDF files are served to users and automatically added to LibGen (if
not already present). According to _Nature_ magazine, Sci-Hub hosts around 60
million academic papers and was able to serve 75 million downloads in 2016. On
a daily basis 70,000 users access approximately 200,000 articles.
The founder of the meta library Sci-Hub is Kazakh programmer Alexandra
Elbakyan, who has been sued by large publishing houses and was convicted twice
to pay almost 20 million US$ in compensation for the losses her activities
allegedly have caused, which is why she had to go underground in Russia. For
illegally leaking millions of documents the _New York Times_ compared her to
Edward Snowden in 2016: “While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a
stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just
about every scientific paper ever published, ranging from acoustics to
zymology.” 21 In the same year the prestigious _Nature_ magazine elected her
as one of the ten most influential people in science. 22 Unlike other
persecuted people, she went on the offensive and started to explain her
actions and motives in court documents and blog posts. Sci-Hub encourages new
ways of distributing knowledge, beyond any commercial interests. It provides a
radically open infrastructure thus creating an inviting atmosphere. “It is a
knowledge infrastructure that can be freely accessed, used and built upon by
anyone.”23
As both projects LibGen and Sci-Hub are based in post-Soviet cou
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