Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel's presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to "determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization," putting the group in the same company as al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.

"WikiLeaks appears to meet the legal criteria" of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, King wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reviewed by CNET. He added: "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States."

Implicit in the vitriol over Wikileaks are the following assumptions:
1. This information was secret before Wikileaks revealed it.
2. If Wikileaks had not revealed this information it would have remained a secret.

I'm not sure I buy these assumptions.

I heard that millions of people had access to this data. Millions. That seems like a very large number. Is that true?

There is no such thing as a secret that millions of people have access to, particularly in an environment that is targeted by professional spies.

I have to assume that if Wikileaks can get this data that other people can get it too. That other people have gotten it before and have ready access to it now. Furthermore, its unlikely that anyone would put anything particularly damaging into this environment knowing that millions of people have access to it, and so its unlikely that buried within this data is some smoking gun that is going to either cause significant negative implications for the US government on the one hand or change the world on the other hand.

Wikileaks has taken information that was essentially public information and certainly available to every spy worth his salt made it literally public information available to every bored journalist and web surfer.

So far no one, on either "side" of the "issue", has been able to articulate a specific consequence associated with the disclosure of this information. The whole thing has been a big yawn fest with a bunch of hand wringing about the fact that it is happening and whether or not things like this ought to be allowed to happen.

I'm worried about what this thus far consequence free situation is being used to justify. The whole thing seems like a pre-game. Its particularly fishy the amount of money that seems to be involved. Who is funding wikileaks?

Some day the US government will have something they really do wish to suppress, and they need processes, procedures, and legal tools to suppress it. Regardless of whether or not this is theater, it will result in the creation of those tools, and those tools will be used in the future in a situation that isn't so consequence free, FWIW.

Attacking open society