Information is the New High Ground

No doubt there is a potentially grave danger to operational personnel in leaking classified information. However, US Government information security (INFOSEC) must adapt to the new net-neutral, information free, hacker-rules reality. WikiLeaks, ClimateGate, Gawker, YouTube, Napster, identity theft are not the first, nor will they be the last, manifestation of a brave new world where information is the most valuable commodity.

The legal, moral, and ethical implications of all of this are grave and under-discussed outside of science fiction (literature, games, conventions, media). Consider:

1. The internet is the great democratizer of information - net neutrality rules. The "old world", including governments, must adapt and implement better INFOSEC or hire ten thousand cyber-agents like China has done. WikiLeaks itself has already been subject to a DNS counter-cyberattack.

2. All information outside of someone's brain is potentially subject to open publication or cyber-infiltration. The crude attempts to control internet traffic, or to make release of particular information "illegal", will string up a few examples in the town square but in the end make hackers burrow deeper and develop new evasion technology. The show will go on.

3. However, maybe the alternative to net neutrality, free information, and unadulterated hacking is a shadowy, unaccountable corporatist-government information regime to which we are subject, object, and clone. Science fiction becomes real - more relevant - every day. We each may be confronted with this new reality. Do we submit to 2084? Or resist? Perhaps: SILENCE IS SUBVERSION.

4. It is unclear how someone who is not even a US citizen, who never signed a US Govt non-disclosure agreement, is doing something illegal by releasing whatever information that they've obtained. He/she has no obligation to the US Govt.

5. We get to see the inner workings of various US and foreign intelligence agencies and diplomatic corps. Historically, this is actually important information - it's what really goes on behind closed doors. We all suspected it. Why "sanitize" some random US ambassador's opinion of the Iranian nuclear program? The truth shall set us free.

Independent hackers or agents sponsored by competing organizations are the equivalent of the invention of the handgun, or the longbow, weapons that completely reversed the military dominance of the knight in the 14th-15th Centuries and handed a tactical advantage to the commoner (and armies employing them). Corporate, military, intelligence, government, and private agencies must account that information is the new high ground, and that the world is at war for it.