By now, Gentle Reader, you understand the power of information.

For instance, you probably know that Israel was able to remotely silence Syria's radar defense grid, allowing Israeli jets to slip unnoticed into Syrian airspace to take out a nuclear reactor the Syrians were building with North Korea's help.

No doubt you also are aware that China has used Google to spy on its domestic human-rights activists, and that Iran's uranium-enrichment centrifuges were crippled last month by a powerful computer virus likely planted by a foreign government.

Episodes such as these (and the cyber-attacks that assail U.S. government and corporate networks at the rate of a million or more every day) constitute only the hot tip of a new Information War that now makes our world several orders of magnitude more dangerous than the Soviet-era Cold War. Today the world faces a cold war on steroids, and it threatens to launch new dictators into power while striking at the peace and security of every nation on Earth.

I'd like nothing better, Gentle Reader, than to relieve your skeptical anxiety by telling you that John Connor defeats the machines by the end of the movie, but I regret that my essay concerns an Information War that is considerably more here and now than the "Terminator" movie franchise—and not at all fictional. Nor is my essay about the technology of information sharing, which has become so pervasive and powerful as to constitute both new opportunities and a genuine triple whammy of threats to global security, economic interests and human rights. I will leave that discussion for the more technically proficient essayists.

I wish to discuss here the Information War as it is manifested through channels that are non-defense, non-governmental and inherently non-secret. Not surprisingly, WikiLeaks is one of these information channels. The other channel (more accurately, a set of channels) is the partisan propaganda machine, best represented by Sarah Palin, the former half-term governor of Alaska and leading tease candidate for president.

Now, it may be, Gentle Reader, that you understand in a general way my concern about the disclosure of American state secrets by WikiLeaks. You might even agree with my concerns. But in identifying Sarah Palin as a national threat, I may have just lost you. Bear with me: I am not jumping the shark. Palin represents a disturbing trend and a potent threat to our nation—not by disseminating any sensitive information, as is the case with WikiLeaks; but by her dissemination of misinformation: what used to be called propaganda.

First things first, though.

WikiLeaks, the infamous "whistleblower" website, has just blown the whistle on international diplomacy. And by that, I mean WikiLeaks has just called a timeout to all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that tend, over time, to make our world a safer place. See the players milling around the field? Those are the world's diplomats, the ones who normally work to beat swords (military spending) into plowshares (useful domestic programs). But those diplomats have just learned that nothing they say in private can be considered private anymore. And worse, they have just learned that the quarterback (the U.S.) has some reservations about the rest of the team. Ouch. Understandably, they've lost that lovin' feelin'. Or at least any team spirit for addressing problems like Armageddon, conventional wars, genocide, starvation, epidemics or natural disasters. Sorry, the hopeful endeavor that was today's diplomatic game has been cancelled because WikiLeaks is raining secrets—in effect, it's taking a leak on the whole world.

Few of the 250,000 or so leaked diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks has begun to publish will do lasting damage by virtue of their content. The damage is to the global diplomatic process, the international friendships and alliances that have developed, the veil of secrecy that historically has protected high-level international negotiations from politicization and fractious public opinion. If it is true that committees are where good ideas go to die, then imagine negotiating a peace treaty with billions of people rendering their opinions; it would never be adopted. This is what the WikiLeaks data dump threatens to achieve: absolutely nothing good.

"But people have a right to know!" some observers demand (in essence). "Surely the light of day has a healthy effect on societies led by secretive governments."

I have to just say "No" to both of these ideas when it comes to international diplomacy.

With respect to the first objection, there is no such thing as the public's "right to know." That phrase was dreamed up by crusading yellow journalists of the 19th century to sell newspapers. American courts have long upheld the basic Constitutional dynamic that the public has a legitimate "interest" in the transparency and accountability of government and its proceedings. That public interest, however, has never been extended to encompass the kind of details of international diplomacy published by WikiLeaks this week. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that freedom of the press does not include the license to damage national security or squander lives.

The argument that WikiLeaks has illuminated our society in any valuable way is not supported by a single fact. Instead, the fallout amounts to profoundly negative consequences for every society on the planet.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is culpable for waging a private information war on the very system that contains crises and tamps down conflicts before they escalate into real wars that get people killed. Very likely, he has blood on his hands from the enormous data dump of Iraq and Afghanistan war reports previously published by WikiLeaks. Like the diplomatic cables, that data dump revealed sources and methods now at risk.

In taking it upon himself to disclose sensitive information and in a manner intended to disrupt international order, Assange has set himself up as the Earth's ultimate arbiter of what should or should not be secret. His role in the new Information War is to single-handedly dictate to governments and sow anarchy among nations. Would you trust Assange to not publish our nuclear launch codes or troop movements in real time? I wouldn't. Allowing his little shop to continue tearing down the walls of our national security will only encourage more acts of info-terrorism. Assange may or may not be guilty of committing alleged rapes in Europe. Instead of being prosecuted on such weak charges, he should be tried for treason,

On the other hand, much as I would like to (figuratively speaking) wring her neck, Sarah Palin deserves to be silenced only by means of confronting her idiocy head-on and depriving her a national soapbox. As the leading proponent of 21st-century McCarthyism, she deserves the same brave scrutiny and opposition as that which took down the paranoid, egotistical Republican senator from Wisconsin, whom she emulates like a personal hero.

In the 1950s, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was known for waving a sheaf of papers and declaring them to be secret evidence of someone's Communist ties. Nowadays, Sarah Palin doesn't even bother waving the papers. She indicts her political opponents using only bald lies and a bat of her eyelashes. The only "evidence" for her views is her own backwards logic.

Palin has compared herself favorably to Ronald Reagan. She has taken mean-spirited swipes at current First Lady Michelle Obama as a "dictator" for her anti-childhood obesity campaign and even at former First Lady Barbara Bush, whom she dubbed a "Blue Blood" in one royally offensive tweet. Palin has lambasted the "lberal media" and journalists such as Katie Couric and others for the sin of exposing her as a nincompoop—a word former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan chose to describe Palin.

Like McCarthy, Palin has used her considerable political talents to endorse and stump for an array of ultra-conservative bigots and ideological zealots. Unlike McCarthy, not all of her endorsed candidates won. Thank God for small favors, but too many did win.

Through her overheated Twitter account, vapid books, new reality series on TLC and her regular appearances on Fox News, Palin has amassed a media spotlight worthy of Oprah. Her aggressive push for exposure puts to shame her campaign-trail ridicule of Barack Obama as an attention-seeking "celebrity." That description now fits Palin to a "T," and she wears it smugly, as if her popularity on the fried-chicken-and-tea-party circuit exhonerates her for the McCain/Palin loss in '08.

While Palin's escapades into political payback might be dismissed as juvenile, her challenge of Obama's moral authority—indeed, of the entire government's moral authority—is recklessly divisive and corrosive to the cause of passing anything remotely useful into law. WikiLeaks damages our security by revealing secrets. Palin hurts the country by telling lies wrapped in clever cluelessness. Her list of enemies has grown longer than Richard Nixon's, her ability to accuse the innocent as sharply hurtful as McCarthy's. From un-"real Americans" in blue states to a president she regularly accuses of being a socialist, Palin's malice knows no bounds.

She should be confronted as Edward R. Murrow once confronted another tyrant in patriot's clothing. She should be hounded off the national stage into obscurity, banished to the wilderness from whence she came. While Palin doesn't rise to the threat level reached by exposing American secrets, she does expose American stupidity and weakness every time she channels her spiritual mentor, Joe McCarthy—which is to say, every damn day of her life.

Palin and Assange have both gone rogue, Gentle Reader, and with them the responsibility to not yell "fire!" in a crowded theater. It's time everyone began pointedly asking the two of them (and the entire propaganda machine) the same query so eloquently demanded of McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"