Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government

[DearAbby]

I confess that I’m torn. I had the same cranky reaction to Time’s Person of the Year choice as pretty much the entire Internet: It’s hard to see the calculation that makes Mark Zuckerberg more influential than Julian Assange in 2010. Still, there’s something about this conventional wisdom that’s annoying in its own right.

When people riff about the impact of Wikileaks, you typically hear how it’s forever changed diplomacy or intelligence-gathering. The more ambitious accounts will mention the implications for journalism, too. All of that’s true and vaguely relevant. But it also misses the deeper point. The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.

<snip>

A government agency faces a roughly analogous choice. The State Department, say, can focus entirely on managing relationships with foreign governments. Or it can perform other tasks on top of that, like providing development aid. Because it’s generally easier to work with people who operate from similar assumptions, rely on the same data, and share a common set of goals and values—which is to say, it’s easier to coordinate with co-workers than with outsiders—organizations often perform these functions in-house. Indeed, that’s one reason they’ve historically grown so large. This has even been true over the last generation, when many business gurus predicted that information technology would make outsourcing nearly frictionless.

Now consider what happens when you plug Wikileaks into this equation. All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization,* the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs.

More @: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/80481/game-changer

[eridani]

1. You are forgetting that people have to be very selective about their information uptake

There's just too damned much of it.

[KharmaTrain]

7. And That's The Danger...

While Wikileaks has provided some fascinating insights into the dark corners of the power elite, it's had little real effect other than mulch for the chattering classes. Maybe something revelead will lead to some kind of serious prosecution or investigation but to date most of what's been released will have more merit for historians in putting these corrupt times in greater perspective.

The real peril is those who will believe anything that comes out of Wikileaks without question and how that could be fertile ground for some black-ops scheme knowing that the blind faith of many will allow them to spread disinformation that could hurt causes rather than expose true coruption. One must be selective and question all sources of information...

[cutlassmama]

2. One can only hope

[robcon]

3. Nonsense. It just means more security for communications.

The OP is utter crap, IMO.

[Statistical]

4. The communications WERE secured.

Obviously when one of the parties breaches that security it makes the security moot.

Encryption helps to prevent an eavesdropper from accessing the information. It doesn't help it when one party is complicit in the release.

There is no such thing as "the government" or "the military" both are made up of people. People who can (and some will) violate the trust they were given.

[social_critic]

5. Silly

Wikileaks means the end of communism and the autocratic state.

[WinkyDink]

6. More Americans know of Facebook than of WikiLeaks. At least, the young demographic TIME craves.

[cbdo2007]

8. If Wikileaks posed any serious threat to ANYONE - Julian Assange would already be dead.

None of the stuff he's releasing have been that big of a deal. Much of it is stuff that is already public anyway and there has been practically no fallout from his "leaks".

Trust me, if the Govt. or "big business" were truly scared of Wikileaks they would just take him out. They've taken out smaller people for a lot less, so why not? It doesn't make sense for them to let him live if he truly is as damaging as many here at DU wish he was.

[bemildred]

9. Not bad.

He sees the core issue, that secrecy reduces the "efficiency" of an organization, and that ready availability of anonymous leaks increases the already extant "friction" of operation in large organizations, a large abused underclass that is in on the "secrets" becomes more risky as it gets larger. Sooner or later the arrangement breaks down, and "leakage" starts to occur, and then you can no longer rely on the secrecy of your secrets. When the added power that derives from being large is offset by the added friction, being large no longers pays.

The twentieth century was not kind to empires, the 21st century will be much worse.

There is a book called "Human Scale" written by a guy named Kirkpatrick Sale, back in the '60s or '70s I think it was, that discusses these issues in a very prescient way.

[formercia]

10. "millions of voyeurs."

watching the Billions of us getting fucked.