Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Involuntary Transparency or Information Warfare?

At Forbes (FWIW), "An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange" (via Memeorandum):

Admire him or revile him, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency, the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago. Over the last year his information insurgency has dumped 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war into the public domain–the largest classified military security breaches in history. Sunday, WikiLeaks made the first of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department cables public, offering an unprecedented view of how America’s top diplomats view enemies and friends alike.

But, as Assange explained to me earlier this month, the Pentagon and State Department leaks are just the start...

It's information warfare, of course. Assange thinks he's some kinda hero who's creating a marketplace for government and business accountability. Yet he admits he has no respect for state legitimacy nor the international system's regime of legalized rules and norms.

We'll see how that works out for him. At WaPo, "WikiLeaks founder could be charged by Feds."

1 comments:

Vek said...

Strange that the previous 2 massive releases got such short play in the media -- literally the one big bang an then nothing -- and they've opted for the same thing a 3rd time.

If I was running this I would be making December Iran month, Jan Nth Korea month, Feb Pakistan etc etc.

Remember that prior to wikileaks releasing hundreds of thousands of Iraq reports, a single paragraph from one of those reports would be a NYT, Wapo, CNN, ABC report for a few days.

The volume here is what makes these releases less important, not more. He's forcing news agencies to write a 2 page article on WW2 when they used to write 2 page articles about a specific battle on a specific beach.