WikiLeaks

Last week I saw the old film Tron. If Tron has anything to do with Wikileaks it is the fact that the characters in the film saw that a problem was at hand and they went out to fix it, despite the fact that they had to go through illegal measures to achieve it. The Tron story is very similar because the main character Flynn had destroyed the MCP digitally and all of this happened without it have being possible for Dillinger, the bad guy, to know anything.

This past week I have been learning about Wikileaks, a website that hosts illegal documents that belong to the U.S government and military. The website is very new, and it was just recently in November 2010 that several thousands of documents were leaked. Though for the most part the website stays under wraps from the mass media, probably soon it will catch on with more media exposure.

A striking realization about these documents is that they are public and yet few people are reading them. We live in an era in which information is so quick to access that many of us have developed shorter attention spans and thus the internet has evolved to have more videos and shorter articles. Thus many people of our time will not read these articles for this reason and also because they are not interested in these types of politics. Many people are eligible to vote, and yet they don't. I think that many of us see some things as impossible to change, thus having information to classified U.S documents seems like it might be useful information but at the same time, it seems worthless, because what can any of us really do with this information?

So for these two reasons I feel that Wikileaks, as successful as it has been in obtaining documents, fails in this respect. But this is nothing that they had any control over.

I think that Wikileaks confirms to us that there is no such thing as confidential data if it is digital or can be digitized. Years ago recording studios were outraged because music sharing programs offered anyone with the internet the ability to download their favorite songs for free, and they are still free and we still have this ability. Now this is the next step.