Schneier on Security: WikiLeaks

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?

* 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.

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.