> Julio Huato: I don't think they can put the genie back in the bottle. Even
> if they
> kill Assange (not unlikely) and shut down his web site, the example
> has been set and there will be many more wikileaks type of outlets.
>
> ------
>
> "They" don't have to shut anything down, since the real effect of all these
> links is/will be null. People sensibly defend themselves against so-called
> information overload by not paying any attention to any that doesn't fit
> their sense of the world. Information simply does not lead to action.
The impact of the leaks will occur on two levels. The immediate, concrete impact will not be on large numbers of people (as Carrol rightly understands), but (what he leaves out) on small numbers of the elite who occupy key positions of power - people who *do* pay attention to the kind of information contained in the leaks, because it concretely affects their power / opportunity / prestige within the circles they inhabit. At that level, the leaks will almost certainly destabilize, and lead to realignment of, at least some important power / trust relations, and will create new points of relative political / institutional vulnerability, at least temporarily during that destabilization and realignment process.
At a much broader, popular level, I think the *fact* of the leaks, and the general awareness that widely entertained suspicions of government duplicity have been publicly confirmed - as well as the cumulative, impressionistic affect of the details that make it into the headlines - will lead to some overall, further - but still admittedly minimal - erosion of trust in "the system."
The fact that this concatenation of effects will still fall wildly short of anything that could incubate revolutionary change isn't sufficient reason not to try to understand it in some detail.