[LINK] How wikileaks was an inevitable result of the internet

[Tom Worthington]

> At 08:46 AM 17/12/2010, Kim Holburn wrote:
> > > But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the 
> > internet has been conclusively demonstrated ...

I don't see that Wikileaks has much to do with the Internet.

What seems to have happened is that someone, most likely a US government 
employee, copied a large number of low classification US government 
documents. They most likely used a writeable media, such as a CD-ROM to 
do this, not the Internet. They then apparently gave that information to 
someone who has been distributing it to newspaper journalists. The 
newspaper journalists have been quoting the material in newspapers.

Copies of the source documents are placed on the web, after the details 
have been reported in the newspaper. But most people are not reading the 
documents on the Internet, they are reading newspaper reports of them. 
None of this depends on the use of the Internet.

In the pre-Internet days to leak government documents, usually with 
government approval, the procedure was to pass photocopies in an 
envelope. Manuka shops was a typical location for this activity in 
Canberra: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuka,_Canberra#Shops>.
Using CD-ROMs, flash drives, or even the Internet, does not change this 
much.

The currently leaked documents do not contain much we did not know 
before. That some politicians have character flaws is hardly a state 
secret. These appear to be low classification documents, which perhaps 
should not have been available to so many people in government, but do 
little more than cause some embarrassment.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra