What do you think about Wikileaks desire to be treated like a journalistic organization (and afforded the same freedoms)?
While I like to give credit to the general public for being insightful, I think the notion of granting first amendment rights to a signing key pushes the limits of what might ever actually happen.
The decentralizing and anti-authoritarian forces of the internet also have the power to legitimize entities that are above ground yet hover outside the reach of traditional jurisprudence (napster, wikileaks, online poker). It's volatile but the stakes are getting higher and the strategies are getting smarter.
The point I think you overlooking is that if Wikileaks is a signing key then it becomes a lot more plausible that the leaked info is contrived and was planted there to achieve a propaganda goal. Like it or not, human authority structures are somewhat necessary to address issues like that. To offer a counterexample, Anonymous could be hijacked by the government far more easily than Wikileaks. I think the ideal social cryptosystem addresses this but does not exist yet, at least at a scale sufficient to have the kind of impact that Wikileaks has had.
As you describe it, they're not giving those rights to the key— instead they'd be acknowledging that the anonymous person using that key already has those rights.
Signatures don't generate themselves any more than guns fire themselves. You can't have a key and a signature without a human somewhere responsible for generating it, and that human is entitled to the right of publishing, even anonymously.
The Supreme Court (in the US, anyway) has found that prohibiting anonymous publishing abridges the basic freedom of speech.
While I like to give credit to the general public for being insightful, I think the notion of granting first amendment rights to a signing key pushes the limits of what might ever actually happen.
The decentralizing and anti-authoritarian forces of the internet also have the power to legitimize entities that are above ground yet hover outside the reach of traditional jurisprudence (napster, wikileaks, online poker). It's volatile but the stakes are getting higher and the strategies are getting smarter.
The point I think you overlooking is that if Wikileaks is a signing key then it becomes a lot more plausible that the leaked info is contrived and was planted there to achieve a propaganda goal. Like it or not, human authority structures are somewhat necessary to address issues like that. To offer a counterexample, Anonymous could be hijacked by the government far more easily than Wikileaks. I think the ideal social cryptosystem addresses this but does not exist yet, at least at a scale sufficient to have the kind of impact that Wikileaks has had.