Terabyte Leaks and Political Legitimacy in the U.S. and China

The leaking of information is a time-honored tactic to undermine the legitimacy of a political opponent or a policy. Sir Winston Churchill relied on it during the run-up to World War II to attack what he saw as weak British responses to German rearmament.

Ever the master of using information and disinformation, he would use question time in the parliament to reveal morsels of secret information. As part of an embarrassment strategy, these were drawn from UK intelligence assessments of Germanys military build-up and from UK policy planning documents.

At another level, the sustained control of information has always been viewed as central to political power. The totalitarian governments of the 20th century were among the best practitioners. The term propaganda came to symbolize this technique of political control of information.

In such a governance frame, the idea of a strategic leak has always been one of a slow trickle of pieces of information. Meanwhile, the event itself or the process in question was unlikely to undermine the power of a determined state propaganda machine.

But now the old style of a steady flow of bit-by-bit leaks may be passing into history. Welcome to the brave new world of avalanche-like leaks, where the unauthorized release of secrets has moved from a trickle to a virtual flood.

And now, that flood has even biblical proportions. Wikileaks has been a manifestation of the changing times. All that is required is having a suitable platform to release those occasional floods of secret information.

In publishing 251,287 diplomatic cables from the U.S. government, the Wikileaks website provided a sustained embarrassment to the United States.

While there were temporary setbacks, the leaks did not shake the government to its core or bring about the end of any political career. The total file size of the entire package of leaked cables was less than two gigabytes (2 billion bytes).

But Wikileaks is passing into history. By comparison, on some estimates, Edward Snowden took from the NSA 2,000 times as much information (4 terabytes, or 8 trillion bytes).

This did shake the United States government to the core. It did so not because Snowden revealed unusual activities that were not previously contemplated. The surprise lay in the scale of activity for which the U.S. government was fingered. That stunned people around the globe, foreigners first and, remarkably, American citizens later.

Originally posted here:

Terabyte Leaks and Political Legitimacy in the U.S. and China