Three Lessons from WikiLeaks: How the Internet is Changing Information Warfare

Posted 3:44 PM 12/05/10

There's no doubt about it: The WikiLeaks story has gripped the international community. Hacker Julian Assange and his nonprofit have divulged a flurry of fascinating secret diplomatic cables that have been recounted in dozens of news stories in recent weeks.

After all, it's one thing to hear an off-the-cuff comment from a diplomat about what he or she really thinks is happening in a global hotspot, but entirely another to read record after record showing systematic analyses offering viewpoints diametrically opposed to vigorously stated government positions.

Despite rigorous attempts to stamp it out, WikiLeaks lives on, leaving a tabla of lessons to be culled from what could well be seen as a historical event. Here are five lessons from this incident:

See full article from DailyFinance with the THREE LESSONS:

http://www.dailyfina...?channel=pscope

LaoPo

You can get access to some of the wikileaks documents at New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/spy-09STATE80163

But, they are only showing a few, mostly concerning the biggest topics so far.

The thing that gets me more than the US, UK and other government authorities chasing their tails on the legality of these disclosures, it's how the venerable new wires such as BBC, Reuters and the like are happily quoting these wikileaks as fact.

The fact that a whole bunch of US diplomatic exchanges fly in the face of what these agencies correspondents were officially led to believe at official briefings, etc., indicates that the new 'i-correspondent' is as much use as tits on a boar pig when it comes to reporting 'facts' and determining the 'truth'.

Makes me wonder if my prepaid and discounted subs with The Telegraph, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Washington Post are really worth it. The revelations make them all look rather redundant.

I think it also shows a big difference between journalistic integrity and pure document dumping for embarrassment sake. There's no story in the diplomatic document dump. The only reason Assange leaked the documents is because they were "classified" and he gets some kind of thrill from the embarrassment it causes. If there was something particularly interesting, he could have posted that.

He has to understand that the documents are obtained illegally. With the Afghanistan document dump, his source for the documents was already being prosecuted by the US Army for a prior theft when the documents were transferred to Wikileaks. Ultimately, Assange is just trying to get media attention from revealing classified documents and, he deserves to suffer the consequences of that act. He's not a journalist, he's a criminal.

You can access some of the information from Guardian Press out of U.K. Been checking it all morning. They have a map of the world with yellow or red dots representing each country. You can select any location to view the cables.