Wow. It's really hard to top this piece from John Naughton in The Guardian telling us how Wikileaks has exposed the fault lines now dividing society. To put it bluntly, it's the establishment and entrenched political powers versus the Web.
The delicious irony about the attack on Wikileaks is that it comes just a few months after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. The boot is now on the other foot.
Naughton writes: "What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net. Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will. But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them."
So that's their choice but the public outrage over the persecution of Assange on trumped up sex changes, and the way hackers shut down Visa and MasterCard today in retaliation for them blocking Wikileaks transactions tells us people will not put up with it.
As a journalist for many decades, I'll say this: disclosure can be messy and embarrassing and yes, it can challenge our sense of morality. But disclosure is the only thing we have when politicians are too venal and self-serving, when public servants are too cowardly, when the media is too close to the perpetrators and when lawyers refuse to speak up. Wikileaks is the inevitable result. And even if it's shut down, the power of the Internet will ensure there will be many more just like it.
As Joby Warrick and Rob Pegoraro write in the Washington Post, Wikileaks' resilience is a demonstration of the power of new Web-based media to take on not only governments but also the traditional news media.
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