WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange have sparked a debate on the recent info revolution and its use, mainly the divisions over data security.
Months after criticizing the Gulf States over the ban of Blackberry phones, U.S. started a campaign to shut down the whistle blowing site WikiLeaks, which does not speak well for its freedom of speech.
Some 250,000 classified US cables and the military logs from the Afghan and Iraq war can be downloaded and leaked, news that makes everyone with classified data to shift in their seats.
Despite attempts to shut down the website, it has worked easily operating from other countries and the data is easily available with websites like Twitter showing the public new sites.
The opinion amongst different people is different.
Jonathan Wood, an analyst at Control Risks, said the people were divided over the use of internet, whether it should be open or not, and this matter is such an example.
On Monday, WikiLeaks released a list of facilities that the US uses; it was heavily criticized because it can increase the risk of militant attacks.
Calling for more support towards Assange and his site, viral emails and some websites called for the boycott of Amazon and PayPal which obstructed Assange’s mission.
US politicians said Assange should be charged with treason and labeled as a terrorist while French government said they were looking for ways to stop the site in the country. The company says its site is being continuously targeted by cyber attacks.
Press freedom groups said the censorship and blocking of the website is an attempt on the principle of transparency. It said that they were shocked to see the freedom of speech policies of US and France were suddenly changed and now were like those of China.
If this amount of data had to be stolen in the past, it would have taken a great number of trucks to move it, but now, thanks to the internet, it is very easy to steal large amount of data in no time and transfer it from one place to the other.
The general opinion is that a certain level of secrecy is vital. The important data must be kept secure because its leakage can cause severe damage, and lives could be at risk.
British government has lost sensitive personal information many times in the past in the form of disks and flash drives. So now the people are growing increasingly suspicious about their information.
But still there is a deadlock on the measures that need to be taken to prevent such a thing from happening on a global level.
Vaporstream CEO Jack Hembrough believes that the people are just getting acquainted with the storage of data and its use in the modern day.
The company has proposed a simple thing— it has devised software that does not save messages. So they cannot be stolen consequently. They say the download of their software has increased by 30 percent since the WikiLeaks story broke out.
The State Department cables cannot be simply destroyed after the person has read it, also the financial discussions of a company cannot be destroyed. So some information has to be saved in the systems and moved from place to place.
Now, there is a discussion amongst people that the governments around the world might be making more and more sophisticated cyber weapons to crumble infrastructures. But there is no policy to use them.
Military or police can hack into the e-messages to check militancy and terrorism, but there is a risk that it would cross the line of privacy or espionage.
WikiLeaks enjoys some impressive support amongst the youth, with many people believing that the charges against Assange are politically motivated. But the governments around the world criticize the site.
The Facebook page of WikiLeaks now has some 850,000 fans and is continuously rising, and that trend looks to grow further with many people following it every day.
Control Risks analyst Wood says that there is a general sense of anti-establishment feeling after the financial crisis. He believed these leaks were somehow linked to the feelings.
