Whatever else WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accomplished, he's ended the era of innocent optimism about the Web. As wiki innovator Larry Sanger put it in a message to WikiLeaks, "Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people."

The irony is that WikiLeaks' use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange's express intention.

This batch includes 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, the kind of confidential assessments diplomats have written since the era of wax seals. These include Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urging the U.S. to end Iran's nuclear ambitions—to "cut the head off the snake." This alignment with the Israeli-U.S. position is not for public consumption in the Arab world, which is why leaks will curtail honest discussions.

Leaks will also restrict information flows within the U.S. A major cause of the 9/11 intelligence failures was that agencies were barred from sharing information. Since then, intelligence data have been shared more widely. The Obama administration now plans to tighten information flows, which could limit leaks but would be a step back to the pre-9/11 period.

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower—there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize 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. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Good. I hope the Internet helps remove power from the U.S. government which is super inflated. I'm glad that people in government won't talk to each other as much, and I want it to be less efficient. I want the free market to dominate.

Incompetence in the government will make it larger, not smaller. And I don't think it will have an impact on power. If the government can't communicate effectively, you'll have several agencies checking you for testicle grenades instead of just the TSA.

f the government can't communicate effectively, you'll have several agencies checking you for testicle grenades instead of just the TSA.

His goal seems to be not to break down and eliminate the government, but to force it to become more restrictive and more security focused.

More restrictive internally to prevent leaks. This could mean returning to a pre-9/11 style of government agencies not cooperating. This ultimately means less effective government monitoring and control over its people.

So much for the culture of openness we were promised.

Wait a sec, where was I?

You were confusing an entertaining and whitty movie with something of actual substance and real worth.

Wait a sec, where was I?

Living in another country outside the enforcement of US Federal Law/Policy?

In contrast, the U.S. has often persuaded countries to change or even break relevant laws, as alleged in the extradition dispute with Canada on Charles Ng.[citation needed] The case of Charles Ng went before the Supreme Court of Canada, where it was decided that extradition to the United States did not violate Mr. Ng's rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, subsequent Canadian case law has overruled the Ng decision. Accordingly in Canada, a prisoner cannot be extradited to a country allowing the death penalty unless assurances have been made to prevent the execution of such.

Not entirely...

It would seem that the majority of Gladers have some issue with Julian Assange and wikileaks.

I do however, reassert my belief that the real target for the federal government is the person who leaked the documents to Mr. Assange. Since Mr. Assange is not a citizen of this country (he is Australian) he has basically guaranteed he will never have the freedom to visit this country without facing arrest for, at a minimum, conspiracy charges. I am curious as to what Australia's laws on freedom of speech are like, perhaps Lydiaa could tell us more.

By the way Talya, Ng was a sexual offender and serial killer. He and his partner Leonard Lake (who committed suicide before capture) raped, tortured, filmed and executed their victims. Hardly an international terrorist of the stripe we normally think about. Canada held him for years on shoplifting, resisting arrest and wounding a police officer, he served time for those offenses in one of your Canadian prisons, then after a long extradition process was returned to the United States where he was tried for those murders and is currently on death row. It was a relatively local event here, I followed it for a long time.

I'm really curious about how Iran will react to the revelation that Saudi Arabia has plotted against them, secretly calling for the elimination of their nuclear program.