What does Wikileaks Portend?

This is I think a very perceptive insight from Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.

Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from Internet … their funds have been frozen … media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization. What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions.

I think it is certainly fair to question the wisdom of Wikileaks in disseminating all of these government cables that while often interesting in some of the specific details they provide, have so far failed to reveal any double-dealing or unknown corrupt behavior by the U.S. or any other country's government. In general many of the revealed facts were known or easily assumed. And yet the harm that these documents have caused to some very important relationships between countries and individuals may be incalculable. Certainly the U.S. government will at least in the short-term likely become less transparent and less willing to share some important information internally, which in and of itself has far-reaching consequences.

But there are also consequences to the actions now being taken against Wikileaks as Greenwald points out. There is indeed a war going on for the control of the internet. Information most assuredly wants to be free, but there are a lot of people that want information to be controlled, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so good reasons, but either way there is always going to be this inherent tension between those who want the information and those who control it (if only for a time).

I think that the internet should never be seen as a panacea, as a means for bettering our society. I think that the internet is a means for changing our society, bettering our society involves making sure we live up to our highest ideals. Change is very difficult, it cuts and pulls in ways unimagined before, and that cutting and pulling can cause a society to move away from its ideals if it's not careful. The internet has this amazing power to connect people, to allow them to share lots of information, to mass together across shared interests and beliefs and change the world. But there is a trade-off in allowing all of that information sharing, you give up a lot of the control of how information flows in a society, and also what kind of information is flowing through the system. It is incredibly scary to give up that kind of control, especially when it can affect something as important as international diplomacy, or even national security.
The question is does the fear of this loss of control and the continued emergence of a world in which information with its potential to both bind us together and tear us apart cause the U.S. and other countries to attempt to take greater and greater control of the internet, escalating the war over the freedom of information. Wikileaks is most significant as a harbinger of what our future will bring. Information is now so easy to share, and that sharing is such an essential part of our system now that it will be impossible to go back. But there will be more and more attempts at control. The question is, where will this conflict finally settle into balance? We're not there yet, maybe we never will be. But this will be an essential conflict of our emerging future. Information, and all the issues around it from privacy to democracy to security, all of these issues are going to help define the new century. Can we continue to serve our ideals while finding a balance between all of these competing concerns over information?