Even Donald Rumsfeld sees the writing on the wall and has ironically supplemented his autobiography with enough (de)classified information to ensure cataclysmic global boredom. I imagine we will see lots of the overwhelm-the-people-with-what-they-want strategy. This is the diplomatic political equivalent to a denial of service attack: death by inundation.

In Assange’s view, authoritarian regimes depend on and operate in a mode of conspiracy, which depends on secret information being kept secret. Introducing mechanisms to expose these secrets can thus impair the proper functioning of the regime.

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?
We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.

Furthermore, Assange attributes the ontology of conspiracy as computational in nature.

What does a conspiracy compute? It computes the next action of the conspiracy.

Coming from a somewhat infamous hacking and programming background, Assange has not surprisingly architected Wikileaks to mimic the effects of a DoS attack. If computation is the core method by which conspiracy operates, then simply disrupting the computation will defeat the system. It is of no minor coincidence that Assange coded the first open source port scanner, Strobe. Port scanners peruse systems for listening ports, which can then be subjected to exploits. Wikileaks works by the exact philosophical inversion of this process: imagine if the vulnerabilities voluntarily presented themselves to the port scanner. Wikileaks is a simple fly paper that attracts these vulnerabilities, luring them to publish themselves in the form of classified documents. Voilà, no hacking necessary yet the exploit is accomplished.

On another level, while Wikileaks succeeds to varying degrees with each exposed revelation, it succeeds to a much higher degree in demonstrating that the accountability of a system can be successfully questioned from outside the system, hence questioning the integrity of the system itself, as Slavoj Žižek (referencing Saroj Giri) takes note of :

What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’.[*] The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.

Hence the outrage. Status quoticians do not like when the status quo itself is threatened.

Emmanuel: How may I assist you today?
You: I closed my account over a month ago and just received a service charge.
You: I need the account FULLY closed and the service charge refunded.
Emmanuel: I understand that you want to close the account.
Emmanuel: May I have the last four digits of the account concerned?
You: It should already be closed.
Emmanuel: Thank you for the information
Emmanuel: Please be with me.
You: I will be with you.
Emmanuel: Thank you.
Emmanuel: I appreciate your time and patience to chat with me.
You: I enjoy our time together.
Emmanuel: Please bear with me for me minute.
Emmanuel: Thank you,
(several minutes pass)
You: You still there? I had a bubble bath while waiting.
Emmanuel: I sincerely apologize to keep you waiting.
Emmanuel: I see that I am successfully placed the request for closing
the account.
You: And the $8.95 charge will be refunded?
Emmanuel: I request you not to make any activity on the account
othewise the account will get active . The account will take 3-5
business days to close the account . I was able to refund the fee as
well.
Emmanuel: Is there anything else I may assist you today?
You: I haven’t made any activity on the account before, but they still
charged me. How do I know it won’t happen again?
Emmanuel: I see that the monthly maintenance fee was assessed to the account .
You: That’s the problem.
Emmanuel: It will occur in a month .
Emmanuel: I apologize and do regret the trouble you had to face today.
Emmanuel: I assure that you will not get this trouble again!
You: What will occur? I don’t want to get charged for an account I have closed.
You: So it is COMPLETELY closed now?
You: No more service charge?
Emmanuel: Yes!
Emmanuel: It will be closed!
Emmanuel: Is there anything else I may assist you today?
You: Yes, BoA has repaid the government bailout loans, so when do we get
reimbursement checks?
Emmanuel: I wish I could have answered but unfortunately my scope is
limited to Savings and Checking accounts.]
Emmanuel: I will help you with the contact details to get the query resolved
Emmanuel: Please contact us at: 1.800.432.1000. We are available from
7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday
and Sunday, Local Time.
You: Ah, I see. Ok, thanks. Back to my bubble bath.
Emmanuel: Sure!
Emmanuel: It was a pleasure assisting you today. Have a pleasant day
and take care.
You: I enjoyed our time together.
Emmanuel: Bye and Have a great day ahead!

Under Bush and a Republican Congress we had an explosion of growth on all fronts: spending that put Lyndon Johnson to shame, huge deficits and a doubling of the national debt, corporate bailouts, further centralization of education, protectionism, expansion of Medicare, increased regulation, undeclared wars, civil-liberties violations and other unchecked executive power, and more. Bush did not veto a single spending bill in eight years. His cutting of tax rates in 2001 and 2003 has to be judged in the context of growing spending. Milton Friedman pointed out that the level of spending, not taxation, is the truer gauge of the government burden. The money has to come from somewhere. Removing it from the economy through borrowing is as economically damaging as taxation — more so when you figure that the government will perpetrate inflation to manage the debt.

That was bad enough, but the Republicans added rank hypocrisy to the mix by claiming to favor free markets.

When congressional leaders began to assemble the mammoth economic stimulus bill, top Democrats and the Obama administration decided that there would be no earmarks: no “special projects,” no pork-barrel spending. In so doing, they gave up some control over how the money is spent, leaving the decision to public servants around the country.

“Someone has to decide how money gets spent. It’s either going to be Congress or the executive branch or states or municipalities,” says Fred Wertheimer of the congressional watchdog group Democracy 21.

1. Sen. Obama has met at least one war he doesn’t love. His early pronouncements against the criminal enterprise in Iraq are enough reason, in themselves, to vote his way on November 4. Anyone paying the least attention must conclude that Lt. McCain’s “cause greater than self” always involves the Army, the Navy, and the United States Marines (not necessarily in that order.)

2. The election of an African-American will end liberal racism as we know it. If an overwhelmingly white nation chooses a black leader, the Jesse Jacksons and other Mau Mauers for identity-based group preferences will be put out of business, as I explained here.

3. One word: Osmosis. You couldn’t live in Hyde Park or teach at the University of Chicago with the intellectual curiosity of a Barack Obama without gaining at least some understanding of libertarian economics. That can’t be said for most of the reactionary left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party dominating Capitol Hill. But I believe Obama is educable on free markets and I’m convinced that Democrats are ripe for a return in the next decade to the liberalism of our party’s founder, Thomas Jefferson (I made this case two years ago in my libertarian Democrat manifesto.)

4. Obama is the best hope for keeping government out of your bedroom and away from your body. As would any Democratic standard-bearer, the senator from Illinois represents the pro-choice, pro-gay rights side of the cultural divide. And he has at least made interesting soundings about reducing America’s status as the world’s number one jailer, much of which is tied to drug offenses and other crimes without victims. No libertarian can feel comfortable with a Republican candidate who doesn’t echo the personal choices demanded by his supposed hero, Barry Goldwater.

5. The hidden hand did well this month punishing stupidity. But libertarians committed to free markets, not corporate oligarchs, must pause to consider the need for field-leveling regulation. More precisely, we should ask whether there was sufficient enforcement of reasonable restraints already in place. We need Republicans to stand against excessive tinkering in markets, of course. But my modest retirement fund may be safer with Democratic regulators in charge than rogue elephants.

6. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Yes, we need to restore America’s reputation around the world. Anybody who’s traveled beyond the Atlantic and Pacific in the past eight years knows America needs a makeover. Whatever you think of Barack Obama—unless, like the mindless U!S!A! crowd, you don’t care what the world thinks—he will restore much of the goodwill we have lost when he raises his hand on January 20, 2009. That’s significant for libertarians who believe in the importance of the nation most committed to free markets and free minds—ours—leading by example. More-of-the-McSame in foreign policy is something we can’t afford.

7. Finally, Barack Obama is smart enough to follow the aspirations of the Gen Y, Millenials, and Echo Boomers next up on the American political stage. They want choices in both their bank accounts and their bedrooms. I don’t have much empirical evidence for that, though the college students I teach suggest that such libertarian leanings are on the rise. After all, a generation growing up with an explosion of mega-data-informed choices literally at its keyboard fingertips will resemble the self-sufficient, liberty-loving founders of the Agrarian Age more than they’ll resemble the social welfare liberals of the Industrial Era who gave us one-size-fits-all central authority mandates.

The oldest candidate in American history won’t inspire such potentially libertarian change—but the senator from Illinois can. It’s change in which you and I can believe, whether or not we believe in any candidate, including Barack Obama.

It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.
…
The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called “housing bubble,” are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.