Everyone who's on Facebook knows (I hope) that anything you post can become public property. You may think that your privacy setting will protect you, but if you'd be embarassed to see that photo in your local newspaper, then don't post it. What's clear from the unfolding Wikileaks saga is that the same applies to diplomatic correspondence. You may think your cables are confidential and sent through a secure network, but electronic data is so easily transportable that you have to expect that sooner or later it will get out. This is part of the reason why the focus on Julian Assange is misplaced. You will have noticed that even though Assange is in prison, the leaks are still being published. The internet is a dispersed medium, definitively a network, and if you cut off one person from it you damage that person, but the network just finds another pathway. In response to the push in the US and elsewhere to prosecute Assange, many jounalists have pointed out tha
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson