
Schneier on Security: WikiLeaks - jeremyjarvis
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/12/wikileaks_1.html
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phsr
I listen to talk radio from time to time, and it still gets me how uninformed
some people can be at times. I heard one host talking about how Wikileaks
hacked the US government, and sperading fear in the way of saying that the US
could be hacked at any moment and we are screwed. Of course, the US Government
and infrastructure could be (and probably has been, in the the past) hacked,
but the Wikileaks problem is one of a LEAK from someone who had ACCESS to the
cables.

I still don't know how I feel about the cable leaks and the war logs leaks,
but I do know that the media is spinning this in the wrong direction, with
some calling to have Assange arrested for espionage. If they are going to
prosecute anyone, it should be the person who gave teh cables to WikiLeaks, as
WikiLeaks is the medium that the cables were distributed. As Schneier points
out, years ago, the newspaper would have leaked the information. Would the US
gov't go after the NY Times if they were the ones leaking the cables?

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metajack
"Would the US gov't go after the NY Times if they were the ones leaking the
cables?"

They did with the Pentagon Papers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Legal_case>

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phsr
Ok, I take back my point about the NY Times

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rmc
* the government is learning what the music and movie industries were forced to learn years ago: it's easy to copy and distribute digital files. That's what's different between the 1970s and today. Amassing and releasing that many documents was hard in the paper and photocopier era; it's trivial in the Internet era. *

Great point.

If you're interested in 'how the internet/computers change things that were
impossible/hard', then I recommend _Here Comes Everybody_ by Clay Shirkey.

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GrandMasterBirt
Could not be any more right. Right now the media (fox) and many shitty
government officials are on a witchhunt. At the moment its wikileaks. But fear
not my young friends, if the information in wikileaks was to be nicely piled
into a BT download complete with a UI which is download and read, then it
would be bittorrent -- the unamerican enemy. They just want to pin the blame.

