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Schwartz On Security: WikiLeaks Highlights Cost Of Security: Page 2 of 2

Now, for the lockdown. According to The Wall Street Journal, diplomatic cables are being removed from classified government systems. But if a classified system can't secure the information against an insider, will State Department systems?

Furthermore, beyond the brouhaha with Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, threatening The New York Times for publishing the cables, and John Boehner, soon-to-be Speaker of the House of Representatives, intimating that Assange should be executed, is WikiLeaks really a security fiasco at all?

At one extreme, commentators are calling WikiLeaks a "bogus scandal" over "empty secrets." Those are the words of author Umberto Eco, who astutely noted that the government cables contain little more than stale press clippings. "The 'extraordinary' American revelations about Berlusconi's sex habits merely relay what could already be read for months in any newspaper," he said. "The sinister caricature of Gaddafi has long been the stuff of cabaret farce."

Setting proper security controls requires devoting the most resources to secure the most important information. And by this measure, the State Department cables don't rate.

Thus, perhaps the lack of advanced security for safeguarding the cables was an astute non-investment, especially as we're now living in what John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the U.K.'s Open University, calls "a WikiLeakable world" that can't be stopped -- at least not without pulling the plug on the Internet.

Accordingly, will it be worth spending millions or billions of dollars in reaction to WikiLeaks, to secure -- in many cases -- what doesn't even qualify as dirty laundry? Instead, maybe more government information really should be "free." It's certainly the less expensive option in the long run.

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