Saturday, December 18, 2010

Wikileaks and the Hidden Force

The recent news about Wikileaks have made me realise that there is a more powerful force out there than the governments of the world. I'm not talking about the direct influence of government secrets nor the people conspiring to bring down Julian Assange (founder of Wikileaks). The force I am referring to is the people who threaten to bring down the most secured websites and financial systems that we once thought to be invincible.

When backers of Wikileaks threatened to bring down established sites like Twitter, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, my immediate reaction was, "Where did these people come from?!"

It's suddenly become like an episode of the X-Men movie - instead of a collision between the human world and the mutants; this is a collision between the governments of the world and the cyberworld.

I speak of this "force" with much respect, not because I support them, but because of what they are capable of doing, yet not done it. It only makes one wonder why? But since they have spoken, the threat is very telling about how vulnerable the internet really is. About how uncomfortable we should be now, considering the amount of information we've divulged in the internet over the years. These guys are not talking about some Mickey Mouse websites where we can dismiss easily. They are talking about websites that could trigger massive disruption to you and me and anyone who has a credit card; which is pretty much everyone in the world!

It did take a long while to exorcise the existence of this "force". Not even the hacking of the Pentagon by Chinese hackers has raised the alert of the cyber-Godfathers. Perhaps this in itself is the conspiracy to test the capability of the cyberworld.

Even if this was the intention, the revelation was very much different from the original. Instead, it was a revelation that governments are capable of acting as and when they want, even if it was within the ambit of law. This has also given traction to my believe that law can be simply tuned (or mistuned) to outlaw something or somebody that runs out of favour with the government.

If Newton's law of equilibrium were to apply, surely a hidden force must exist

Wikileaks have provided lots of evidence that the most powerful people in the world don't like seeing. The person who runs Wikileaks is only a journalist and an activist. This bloke is an ordinary folk like us and he is in trouble. How on earth an ordinary folk like us could match the forces that are coming against him? If Newton's law of equilibrium were to apply, surely a hidden force must exist.

1 comment:

penelope haque said...

A wake up call indeed.
I froze admittedly and started thinking of how my (though measly) money could be at risk!
:)