The real lesson from WikiLeaks

Now that WikiLeaks has exposed yet another massive trove of secret government documents there is a lot of talk about how this is illegal and WikiLeaks ought to be shut down and it's staff prosecuted. This is, I think, misdirected. If WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were arrested and prosecuted, this would not, I suspect, stop the leaks.  There are plenty of other anarchists around who would pick up the task and carry it along, and there are plenty of misguided or disgruntled people who would supply them with sensitive information.

The real question, I think, is why was someone able to download such a massive collection of sensitive documents in the first place.  Clearly the government's security is pretty bad.  A disgruntled employee ought to have been able to download and leak, perhaps, at most a few documents directly relevant to their work.  So why was someone able to download such a massive collection?

There is no way to put the genii back in the bottle. In today's world, if it can be downloaded electronically someone will download it. Once it is downloaded, it can be on the net in minutes, visible to the whole world.

The issue that ought to be getting attention now is what does the government need to do to disseminate it's sensitive documents in a manner that cannot be so easily downloaded or copied.  Certainly one step would be to build a system that unambiguously logs each download and identifies who did it. That would be a start.  Another step would be to make such documents available in a form which can only be read on a screen, not downloaded onto a thumb drive or DVD (though digital cameras make that a stopgap measure at best).  I'm sure creative people can think of other effective means of making such wholesale leaks at least more difficult, if not impossible.  Clearly whatever the government is doing now is insufficient in today's modern digital and net-savvy world.