The now-criminal organization known as Wikileaks is threatening the cyber-equivalent of nuclear blackmail: shut it down, its backers say, and it will release the decryption key to a supposedly-devastating set of encrypted files that have been made available for download since July.  Which means that: everybody who has already downloaded that document, and now has it on your hard drive?  Congratulations!  You’ve just been signed up for a criminal conspiracy to commit blackmail, extortion, and espionage against a variety of nation-states, including the United States of America.  And when the FBI (if you’re fortunate enough to live in the USA; other countries’ domestic counter-terrorist agencies tend not to be as gentle) comes to take you away – and they will – the general response from the populace will be that you were lucky not to get actually shot.

Seriously, if there was ever any doubt that Wikileaks has a fundamental disconnect with reality, this would be it.  An individual can’t destroy the USA with mere ‘revelations’ – or pretty much any stable nation-state, really – but the USA can destroy any one individual, or even group.  We don’t, because flaws and all we’re still The Good Guys… but we can, and if you punch my country, it punches right back.

And hard.

Moe Lane