Wikileaks is a good thing

As you turn on the TV, you are bombarded with silly hyperbole about how Assange could, might possibly be a terrorist!?!  What you're actually seeing is the status quo in full damage control.  Wikileaks changes the playing field in a fundamental way, it actually makes entities accountable.

I don't see how this is a bad thing, if you're a citizen.  If you're a government that's been acting in a way that's less then transparent, it's horrifying.  If you're a corporation that's been misrepresenting itself or doing things that you'd rather not have the government, shareholders and/or the general public knowing about, Wikileaks is a threat.

Clearly, these entities understand the idea that the control of knowledge is power.

What I also find interesting is that there's been no shocking revelations as of yet.  There are no smoking guns.

What have we learned so far from Wikileaks?
* Iraq and Afghanistan are the ugly messes we all thought they were...
* Pakistan's ISI has been involved with the Taliban
* Pakistan's leaders while publicly condemning drone strikes, have given tacit approval of them because it means it doesn't cost them any troops.

I could continue to list "revelations", but we all get the idea... It's all stuff that without being outright said, we'd pretty much all deduced at this point.

While as an American citizen it's interesting to actually get some insight into the inter workings of one corner of my government, I can only imagine what other countries who have governments that are entire opaque suddenly getting some insight (albeit through our state department) into their governments, now that'll interesting!

This of course is bad news for those involved who have secrets they'd rather not talk about, so they'll attack Wikileaks, baring that they'll go after it's infrastructure.  When they can't stop Wikileaks they'll go after Assange.  When that doesn't work, they'll then try to argue about the validity of what's been released.

Now when this latest freak out over, I see a number of things happening...

Firstly, everybody possible will try to enact draconian laws which will be shot down by the judicial branch.

Secondly, the State Department and the DoD are going to make it impossible to get anything out of their networks. As an IT guy, why it's was so easy to get this information off the network in the first place boggles my mind.