This article summarizes certain things very vell: The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous And How Little The Old Guard Realizes What’s Going On | Techdirt.
The article discusses the difficulty for old powers to face new power, power of distributed individuals.
In USA, “former state department official Christian Whiton — says that [that President Obama and Congress have] failed by not ‘exploring opportunities for the president to designate Wikileaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them.’”
This is wrong on many levels, but let’s analyze two.
First, Mr. Whiton implies that whistle-blowing should be penalized with death. This is just plain wrong. Even if you think whistle-blowing is wrong, you can’t just go around killing citizens of other countries because they spread information you do not like to be spread. The real deal is that whistle-blowing is essential for modern society. There are powers that are very hard to control, namely military of powerful countries and secret services. The only way to control them is for someone to blow the whistle, reveal to public when they have crossed too many lines. The outrage about Wikileaks goes to verify this: the men in power are not angry to Wikileaks because it “endangers US soldiers”, but because whistle-blowing puts limits to their power, and righteously so.
Second, like the article I linked points out, you can’t shut down whistle-blowing by declaring war on Wikileaks. It’s an distributed effort and countless individuals consider it an essential thing to do. There will always be someone to step up, and more advanced methods used to hide the locations and people behind it.
The real way to cut the amount of data revealed by Wikileaks is to fix your organization, military, secret services, large corporations, so that the threshold for someone needing to blow the whistle is not surpassed. But admitting this is hard, especially for people like Mr. Whiton.