Other Source of Energy

The Business Spectator has an article by Andrew Leonard looking at some of the implications of the upcoming Wikileaks dump of data from a large American bank - Can WikiLeaks tame Wall Street?.

Forbes magazine is making a very big deal of a declaration by WikiLeaks maestro Julian Assange that sometime early next year, "a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out."

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. "But its also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight thats not done, the priorities of executives, how they think theyre fulfilling their own self-interest."

Strangely, despite devoting thousands of words to a blossoming war between the technologists seeking to provide the private sector with leak-proof security systems and the information-wants-to-be-free revolutionaries personified by Assange, reporter Andy Greenbergs original story had two big holes. First, he missed Assanges assertion last year, published by ComputerWorld, that he was sitting on five gigabytes of data liberated from Bank of America, which puts that institution at the top of the list of likely exposure suspects. But more important, Greenberg doesnt devote much attention to what a world in which big corporations cannot keep the lid on their internal communications and deliberations sealed would look like.

There seems little doubt that that world is coming. Whatever you think of the ethics or legality of such involuntary disclosure, or regard Assange as a noble whistle-blower or rank terrorist, theres no getting around how easy it is to dump vast amounts of information into the public domain in the era of portable hard drives and ubiquitous Net access. From the dawn of the computer age, information has become ever harder to control, and theres no sign of that changing any time soon. Quite the contrary, as proven by the current flurry of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables released.

But what will it mean, practically speaking? Ideally, greater transparency is supposed to improve market efficiency. So if, say, a data dump on a big bank revealed the corruption at the heart of that institutions operations, it would be punished by the market, perhaps to the point of going out of business. In the interview with Forbes, Assange goes so far as to assert that "one or two" big banks may collapse as a result of WikiLeaks revelations.

Could Julian Assange achieve what a global financial meltdown failed to accomplish? Perhaps, if the information is fresh enough and reveals financial problems previously unknown. Or maybe there will be juicy material that gets plugged immediately into the proliferating investor lawsuits raking over dubious securities trade of the last decade.

But thats all after the fact. The more interesting question is to wonder whether the threat or certainty of eventual exposure has any kind of prophylactic effect on behaviour. For example, would the financial crisis have played out any differently if we could have read every e-mail or text written by Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch mortgage bond traders during the hot and heavy days of the housing boom?

Grist has a look at one minor Wikileaks revelation about US efforts to promote GMO crops in Africa - Wikileaks: State Dept. wants intel on African acceptance of GMOs.

The Wikileaks release of U.S. State Department classified diplomatic cables may be problematic, but it has been quite a trove of information on the workings of our diplomatic corps. For the most part, the dump has confirmed things that we already knew about U.S. policy -- and that seems to be the case regarding the one mention of agricultural policy in these thousands of emails and documents (no doubt there are more) to which I was alerted.

Buried deep in a document that outlines priorities for intelligence gathering in the African "Great Lakes" countries of Burundi, the Republic of Congo, and Rwanda is a list (for the most part, very reasonable) of what the State Department would like to know about the regions agricultural policy. Things like government policies on food security and food safety top the list, for example, along with information on the impact of rising food prices in these countries. Agricultural yield statistics, infrastructure improvements, data on deforestation and desertification, water issues, and invasive species are included as priorities for "reporting" as well.

But also getting its own line item on the intel priority list is this:

Government acceptance of genetically modified food and propagation of genetically modified crops.

Sigh.

Tom Philpott has reported on the State Departments biotech-loving science adviser Nina Federoff and her industry ties -- and certainly USDA Chief Tom Vilsack believes that genetically modified foods are an answer to world hunger. So this revelation hardly counts as a surprise. But its still a shame to see that our spymasters are actively engaged in efforts to make the world safe for Monsanto. Arent there better things for them to do?