We awoke Monday to news of the latest Wiki Leaks document dump of some 250,000 documents or cables or whatever. Early news had stories of our State Dept. personnel, from top down, furiously making international calls over the Thanksgiving Weekend just passed (now, just a belly-busting memory), to try to mitigate the almost incalculable damage. But, the information leaked and posted worldwide to anybody with a computer and an internet browser, is so massive that it will take time to digest all of it and to assess the damage to our relationships with our allies, our enemies, and governments, big and small, all over the globe. To say nothing of how many people flying below the radar, making comments or working behind the scenes, are now seriously jeopardized.
It is hard to imagine a more threatening act of pure terrorism, which, having searched my own soul, truly cannot benefit anybody rational at this point – other than the obvious and increasingly ominous risk that one fine day like this one, we will all look up from our work (or play) to our last sight on this planet this time around . . .. a flash . . . .
We know that warfare is occurring on the Internet, courtesy of China, North Korea, lately Israel (putting an incredibly sophisticated worm into Iran’s nuclear workings), and even of our own country, among many others. Countries with fewer morals or less of a conscience have hired all forms of hackers and rogue computer geeks to play the grandest videogame of them all – how to bring down complex 21stC systems in just a few keystrokes. To the truly demented, what could be more fun!?!
You would have to look far and wide to find a greater and more serious proponent of the First Amendment Constitutional Right to Free Speech than yours truly, but, I find myself truly aghast when considering the scope of these Wiki Leaks, coming as they are now, in waves, like that hellacious tsunami that wiped out a quarter million human souls on the day after Christmas earlier in the first decade of this century. Misguided is a gentle way of characterizing the animus involved here.
Are we now embarking on the age of Internet Information Dumping as a form of warfare? It seems incredible that this can all be coming from the Army Private being held as responsible for the Wiki Leaks somewhere in Iraq right now. Privates, even in intelligence operations, should not be able to get their hands on information like this.
We gin up and spin out incredible amounts of information daily, even hourly now – I have seen all kinds of comparisons about how the totality of human information grows exponentially now, faster than can be believed, and I find myself longing for the days when somebody like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, could actually amass a personal library of all human knowledge within their lifetimes. When we count websites, email, text messaging, Facebook and Tweet messaging, the subscription databases, and the ability of any single human with a prodigious scanning capability to dump information in a format which can be read worldwide by billions, it is truly incalculable, and growing exponentially, of course.
But, we trust that governments around the globe have the best talent available to keep their secrets truly secret, don’t we? Well, we might have until the Wiki Leaks information gushers started some while ago.
The only people that I can think of who can benefit from this tidal wave of knowledge are historians, who will endlessly splice these bits, bytes and pieces together, write a zillion doctoral theses using this material, and likely produce some masterful histories of this most complex and troubling age in which we find ourselves. Who else?
This is serious, folks. We tend to spend far too much time on peripheral issues, particularly around election-times. We need to spend a whole lot of time right now, wondering, worrying and taking about productive and serious steps to get our arms around this Wiki Leaks situation and who is feeding this material to the zealot who sees no wrong in exposing all the back-room dealings and doings which are necessary to keep modern diplomacy on top of things and countries playing nicely with one another. If we don’t get hold of this right away, then we will continue to slide down this slippery slope to somewhere that none of us can presently imagine.