Each Wikileaks dump is a different kind of funhouse mirror, aborbing the gazes of politicians, activists, philosophers, pundits, and what-have-you, repaying them with illusory advancements of their agendas.<p>So now we get --- respectfully! The Name Of The Rose is one of my all-time top-5 books! --- the take of a blowhard classically-trained Italian semiotician (yeah, <i>there's</i> someone who isn't going to see his life's work reflected in the Wikileaks narrative) on world politics.<p>And from it, we get these gems of foreign policy:<p>* The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper<p>* Embassies have turned into spy centers (heavens!)<p>* Wikileaks did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama (irreparable! Unlike, say, losing the house and practical control of the Senate?)<p>* Technology has advanced to the point where governments can't keep secrets anymore<p>These points, all utterly banal, some dubious, would have been shrugged off in any article not written by a famous person in the context of Wikileaks. But now that we have Wikileaks, anything any famous person writes, be it bridge trolls like Michael Scheurer and John Bolton or has-been literary stars like Umberto Eco, glistens with supposed insight.<p>I'm not a WL supporter, but I'm worried that the effect it's having on public discourse may be bothering me even more than the underlying principles.<p><i>PS: I'll concede the humor buried in the subtext of Eco making reference to Dan Brown.</i>
I like Umberto Eco, but a lot of this is what I call "profundity by paradox". Technology goes backward as it advances! The real secret is that there is no secret! Etc.
Even though Umberto Eco probably does not realize that mr. Mannings activities do not really qualify as hacking he's right on the money in that any large trove of data will sooner or later become public.<p>There is a ratchet action at work here which causes information to be disseminated even when you really don't want to. The mere existence of information that more than just a very few people have access to almost guarantees a leak and eventual publication, with some direct numerical link between the number of people that have access and the chances of the information being leaked.<p>Those tasked with guarding our privacy are worried about all this precisely because they seem to be incapable of doing so, even when dealing with stuff that would never have seen daylight 20 years ago.<p>With every advance in telecommunications technology, computing and storage the amount of information explodes further and avenues through which it may leak out multiply.<p>Cellphones with cameras are one nice example of this effect.<p>When you put together a 'list of sensitive installations' you need to realize the impact of just creating such a list. Once created you have to assume that eventually it will fall in to the hands of those that you don't want to have it (and what a banal list it is, is that the best they could do?).<p>Spy novels have been preaching 'need to know' for a long time, and governments the world over have always struggled with finding the right balance between being able to do their jobs as well as not helping their perceived enemies or other parties to the information they so painstakingly collected.<p>It looks to me as though the big lesson of this leak (besides a bunch of important details in the cables themselves) is that this process is currently failing.
It seems that Eco's DVD player has no "pause" button.<p>Also, the interesting part regarding Berlusconi in the WL cables are not the facts, but the american opinions about them, which apparently are quite different from the official ones.
Makes sense. Another article spoke of how documenting the Bush and Obama presidencies will be tough and probably not that thorough, as the juicy bits are written on scraps of paper that are immediately disposed of.<p>There is a market for an offline, secure technology, like a modern day codex.
Great article. I especially liked this thought provoking segment:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976276" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976276</a>