Jed Hallam

Wikileaks pushed forward with its plans to release thousands of cable transmissions from the US embassies around the globe – ranging in seriousness from a member of the British Royal family being an embarrassment (guess who?) to intelligence on Pakistani nuclear arms. And these are only the few details that have been released by the carefully selected five European media outlets so far – the next few days could, potentially, be revolutionary.

Regular readers will know that I don’t usually write about geopolitical relations and web democracy – I leave that for Simon – but one of my initial thoughts when reading about this story was what consequences this would have for the wider world and the transparency of the individual.

As I’m trying to write this up quickly (I’ve got work to do) I though I’d share my train of thought;

Government keeps secrets > whistleblower finds secrets > whistleblower passes secrets to Wikileaks > Wikileaks publish secrets > mainstream media publish secrets > people read secrets > people see that governments can no longer keep secrets because of the internet > people realise that the internet is changing things

So, how does this effect the individual?

Well, in my head, things will go one of three ways;

1) people will start behaving themselves and become squeaky clean – thus destroying any risk of being found out

2) people will become ultra-concerned about their privacy and online and begin such crazy activities as Whitewalling (wonderfully demonstrated by Drew)

3) the world will totally change and people will become totally relaxed about who they are and what they do – every tweet and Facebook update will become accountable for and Eric Schmidt will die a happy man.

Which do you think is the future?