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Comment by Estragon | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this comment is being voted up. What does it mean, and how does it relate to the comment it's responding to?

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It means that the free and open exchange of information is the public's best weapon against corruption.

If that's so, why is Africa still a mess? We have no shortage of knowledge about the scale of corruption south of the Sahara (and north of it); the problem is that those who are prepared to fight in, let's say, Nigeria and those who want to stop corruption in Nigeria are seldom the same people.

In the end, weapons are the most important weapons. If a group of people no longer care about anything but their own power, and they're armed, the thing to do is to deprive them of those arms -- not to catalog their abuses and trust in the power of words.

Africa is a perfect example of a continent where, in many countries, there is no free press and little access to the Internet. In general you'll find a strong correlation between a lack of free press and low GDP, war, oppression etc. Yeah, causation != correlation, but obviously the reason for a corrupt government to disallow the free press is to keep itself in power.

Africa is meant to be a mess, Western powers ensure it through foreign aid, propping up dictatorship all to ensure cheap access to raw materials.

With the internet you can take on the DoD. If you know what you're doing, you can hack the DoD in such a way. Transparency all the way: look how Wikileaks are being so open on Twitter, look how we're all discussing it.

You'll have a hard time hacking past an air gap.

Actually that is the most effective kind of hacking -- past an air gap between people not between a person and a machine connected by a wire.

The most serious breaches of security are the ones done by insiders, agents and whistle-blowers, not by hacking a network or crypto protocol.

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