A Wikileaks lesson for all of us - there is no safety or confidentiality in electronic communication

in a way, it's almost schadenfreude... those of us who pay the slightest bit of attention have known for quite some time that everything we do electronically, whether it's an atm withdrawal or something as mundane as swiping a supermarket discount card, can be - and probably is - sniffed at the very least and more likely recorded somewhere in the vast terabytes - or petabytes or exabytes - of government databases... however, it's gratifying to see that the tables can be turned...

US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment

Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.

[...]

Words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not. The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets. ... [T]he walls round policy formation and documentation are all but gone. All barriers are permeable.

and that's a good thing... let's hear it for transparency, even the inadvertent kind...

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