2010-12-09: It’s not about WikiLeaks!
The witchhunt on WikiLeaks is in full swing, and rage and desperation make the assailants completely oblivious to something that is really obvious once you step back and look at the big picture:
WikiLeaks is not at the core of the matter! And Julian Assange is an even less important part of the picture.
Guess what? Even if WikiLeaks should end up dead by the wayside (which, even though I’m not necessarily a fan of WikiLeaks, and even less of Julian, will not happen any time soon), others will spring up in its place. Anyone who is sufficiently tech-savvy and wants to spread data publicly over the Internet will find a way to do so. Anything that’s out there on the Internet for any period of time has escaped for good and can never be controlled completely again. The only way you can change that fact is to put the genie back into the bottle, i. e. switch off the Internet. And that could prove to be difficult even for the US government (not least because the corporate US would not like it very much).
The core of the problem is that too much information that is supposed to be secret has been collected, stored in digital form in too many places, and made accessible to too many people. Data security policies from the age of carbon paper and typewriters are being applied to interoperable networks and USB drives.
And the lesson to learn from this is: If in doubt, don’t create data, don’t collect it, don’t store it, much less digitally. Throw out the perv scanners. Switch off the surveillance cameras. Forget about telecommunications data retention.
And forget about fighting WikiLeaks, it’s futile – information society is a hydra, for every head chopped off two new ones grow.
