The Wikileaks scandal is a war for the future of the Internet

[n2doc]

By Tom Mendelsohn
The Foreign Desk
Wednesday, 8 December 2010 at 12:29 pm

You’ll have been following the Wikileaks saga, of course, because it is novel and interesting. Maybe you like it because it looks like a live action retelling of Enemy Of The State, or because history seems to be in the making. It feels big, doesn’t it? It is, but it’s bigger than that, too: what we’re witnessing right now is the opening of hostilities in the first big infowar. The war for the Internet is very big indeed.

If you’re not a digital native, or if you’re some kind of hearty outdoors type, this may not seem important, but you’re dead wrong. We could be spectators for the start of the cyber Great War – and they’ve just knocked over Franz Ferdinand.

We’ve seen cyber skirmishes before: Russian hackers targeted and sank Georgia’s internet infrastructure during their brief conflict in 2008, while there’ve been hints of Chinese muscle flexing for some time – especially last month, when traffic through US government sites was rerouted through Chinese servers for 18 minutes in November.

The difference now is that this battle is extra-national; it isn’t one country against another, so much as an establishment of nations fighting a global insurgency – with the soul of the Internet as the spoils.

more

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/12/08/the-wikileaks-scandal-is-more-than-just-a-diplomatic-scuffle-its-a-war-for-the-future-of-the-internet/