The State Department is a social network, and accusing Assange of treason (never mind that he’s not an American citizen) is screaming privacy foul on a national scale. So is the White House’s condemnation of WikiLeaks. At the same time, the Times reports that these very same diplomats have been asked to commit privacy fouls themselves:One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about “office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes,” as well as “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.”
Whether you buy WikiLeaks’ justification for releasing the cables and whether you accept the arguments by the Times’s Bill Keller and other top editors about why they published and reported on the cables will be popular debates among bloggers and guests on cable TV and talk radio. But it almost doesn’t matter. Today, massive amounts of data can be collected, stored, and mined. We still harbor the illusion that many of our conversations are private or ephemeral, but the company that now owns my very first ISP could have fifteen years of my e-mail on its servers; my instant messages are all logged; my voice-mail messages are now audio files that can be forwarded and archived; my photographs and even my word-processing documents are moving into the cloud. It may be harder today to guarantee that you are having a private conversation than it was in the Soviet Union.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/11/cable-traffic-wikileaks-facebook-the-cloud-and-you.html#ixzz16iYZtW1B
Lots of interesting thoughts about WikiLeaks are coming out, but many of them turn out to be reflections on our own dependence on and trust of others who may not be as trustworthy or whose systems may not be as secure as we would like them to be, or as they claim they are. It is a good moment to reflect on our own personal information management practices.
