Mishakal wrote:Well far from what the mainstream media said at first, some interesting stuff is coming to light due to the cableleaks, ranging from revelations that the Chinese are ok with an eventual collapse of North Korea to the fact that it is ARAB states and not Israel that is pushing for an invasion of Iran.
The problem that the cableleaks exposed is one that is going to plague governments due to the rise of the Internet, the more things you try to keep secret, the less people will respect the state for the secret keeping. In addition that, the more secrets you have the more people you have to have in the loop in order to do their jobs properly, and with an excess of secret keeping and a large pool of people with access to them someone is bound to lose respect for the system and expose everything.
Just before the leak, there were over 800,000 people with the kind of access required to view everything that was declared Top Secret by the United States government and the bulk of the governments business was kept under lock and key and after 9/11 the establishment of a special intranet to distribute ALL of the classified material to make it easier for those with clearance to access the data became a recipe for disaster.
Now the gov. can do one of two things, reform the system so they can be proud of the things that they do and display them to the public, or go into bunker mode and balkanize everything and become even less efficient than they already are. Either way the winner will be the American people because we will either get a better government, or at least an inefficient bad one.
Ah, back on track!
One of the real dangers of Wikileaks is that, ironically, the blowback may cause less information sharing among agencies and governments. Fewer people looking at a variety of data, fewer diplomats and leaders willing to be candid with each other, etc. And, therefore, fewer leaks coming Wikileaks' way.
The State Department's database of diplomatic cables has already been cut from Secret-level servers in most if not all areas. I sincerely hope it goes no further - the worst danger being that we could go back to pre-9/11 levels of information sharing. Who knows if another major attack will not be foiled because the right people were not coordinating with each other? Or if some abuse of power is going on, but fewer people hear about it and thus the odds of it getting leaked go down? I doubt that much blowback willl be the case, but it's worth mentioning.
