This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
The legacy of Wikileaks—the outing of secret government information—is all the vogue.
It won't stop with PRISM and the government contractor who fed The Guardian and The Washington Post the skinny on the U.S. surveillance program.
The question is what comes next—and the only given is that there most certainly will be a "next." This is a sky(net)’s-the limit-proposition for the intelligent handicapper. It's not just leaky insiders vs. government, but bureaucrat against bureaucrat: China vs. the U.S., Russia vs. Georgia, Israel vs. the CIA (no more need for Jonathan Pollards). The possibilities are endless. Hackers without borders.
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If you were endowed with cyber omniscience where would this all go? What could happen or who was behind the major imbroglios? Will the supposedly anonymous Tor be exposed as a target of government snoops? Who were the masterminds behind Stuxnet? Is the Syrian government responsible for the regular Internet blackouts there? Was it a network of hackers, or Russian government agencies, that shut down sites on Georgia’s Internet during a conflict between the two nations in 2008?
Help us add to the list and let us know what you think about the morality of all this. Should the ever more available tools of much-vaunted Big Data, letting us burrow into the deepest recesses of the blackest of black databases, be given free rein? Is nothing left that is secret? Let us know.
Image Source: Adam Feuer