This is the first lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures themed ''Secrecy, Power and Democracy'- Hosted by Raimond Gaita at the Melbourne Law School. WACA will be posting videos of each of the lectures and would like to thank the Melbourne Law School for granting us permission to film the series. Due to our late awareness of the first lecture we only had access to a cheap consumer grade camera and this film has too much movement. If this disturbs you please visit our website and use the audio file of the lecture www.wikileaksaustraliancitizensalliance.net Our further video instalments of this series will offer a higher quality record. Two decades after the Berlin Wall came down, and a decade after 9/11 became the pretext for a relentless attack on citizenship and civil liberties, a series of releases by the Wikileaks website threw the operation of secrecy and state control of information into chaos. From the Icelandic rebellion against financial crisis, to the Arab Spring, both the quantity and quality of information released has changed the relationship between state, citizen and information. These momentous events allow us to rethink the inherited privileges and assumptions of state and corporate power, and to ask if a new relationship can be created between global citizens, states and international organisations - indeed, it causes us to ask how it could not be. Guy Rundle is currently the UK correspondent for Crikey and a regular contributor to ...