WikiLeaks is still hot, and the top story at the New Republic today is Game Changer - Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government. Noam Scheiber predicts that WikiLeaks will both survive and will shrink overbearing organizations until they are no longer Big Anything.

Now consider what happens when you plug Wikileaks into this equation. All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization,* the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs.

Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered. In a decade or two, we may not only see USAID spun off from the State Department. We may see dozens of mini-State Departments servicing separate regions of the world. Or hundreds of micro-State Departments—one for every country on the planet. Don’t like the stranglehold that a handful of megabanks have on the financial sector? Don’t worry! Twenty years from now there won’t be such a thing as megabanks, because the cost of employing 100,000 potential leakers will be prohibitive.

Such predictions are too glib for my tastes. I could more easily see penalties for whistleblowing becoming much more severe than see megacorporations just giving up and downsizing. There will be blood.

An Adbusters article, Democracy's Napster Moment, led me to the book Underground, written by Suelette Dreyfus but researched by one Julian Assange. According to Adbusters, Mendax, one of the hackers referenced in the book was also rumored to be one Julian Assange. The first chapter concerns a worm, WANK, attacking the VMS network at NASA as they prepared to launch the nuclear-powered Galileo towards Jupiter:

The tension quietly rolled into black humour. The team couldn't help it. The head-slapping stupidity of the situation could only be viewed as black comedy.

The NASA site had a password of SYSTEM for their fully privileged SYSTEM account. It was so unforgivable. NASA, potentially the greatest single collection of technical minds on Earth, had such lax computer security that a computer-literate teenager could have cracked it wide open. The tall poppy was being cut down to size by a computer program resembling a bowl of spaghetti.

The first thing any computer system manager learns in Computer Security 101 is never to use the same password as the username. It was bad enough that naive users might fall into this trap ... but a computer system manager with a fully privileged account.

Who wrote that virus?

Likely as not, only an Australian would see the worm's link to the lyrics of Midnight Oil. .... Even as investigators sniffed around electronic trails leading to France, it appears the perpetrator was hiding behind his computer and modem in Australia.

A vigorous hacking community was flourishing on the BBSs in and around Melbourne.

Mainstream and respectful of authority on the surface, Bowen possessed the same streak of anti-establishment views harboured by many in the underground. His choice of name for Zen underlined this. Zen came from the futuristic British TV science fiction series `Blake 7', in which a bunch of underfunded rebels attempted to overthrow an evil totalitarian government. Zen was the computer on the rebels' ship. The rebels banded together after meeting on a prison ship; they were all being transported to a penal settlement on another planet. It was a story people in the Australian underground could relate to. One of the lead characters, a sort of heroic anti-hero, had been sentenced to prison for computer hacking. His big mistake, he told fellow rebels, was that he had relied on other people. He trusted them. He should have worked alone.

I believe that is called foreshadowing.

Back in early 1988, Mendax was just beginning to explore the world of hacking. He had managed to break through the barrier from public to private section of PI, but it wasn't enough. To be recognised as up-and-coming talent by the aristocracy of hackers such as The Force and The Wizard, a hacker had to spend time inside the Minerva system. Mendax set to work on breaking into it.

Minerva was special for a number of reasons. Although it was in Sydney, the phone number to its entry computer, called an X.25 pad, was a free call. At the time Mendax lived in Emerald, a country town on the outskirts of Melbourne. A call to most Melbourne numbers incurred a long-distance charge, thus ruling out options such as the Melbourne University dial-out for breaking into international computer systems.

Emerald was hardly Emerald City. For a clever sixteen-year-old boy, the place was dead boring. Mendax lived there with his mother; Emerald was merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time, Mendax and his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.

Sometimes Mendax went to school. Often he didn't. The school system didn't hold much interest for him. It didn't feed his mind the way Minerva would. They Sydney computer system was a far more interesting place to muck around in than the rural high school.

Whether Assange was Mendax or not, it's a fascinating read, though not edited well for spelling. The entire book is online now, and can be downloaded as well.