The difficulty as I see it, is that the problem isn’t bounded as neatly as Assange would have us believe. I don’t accept his narrative purely on his say-so. It might be true but there ought to be a way in which anyone interested can determine that to his satisfaction without relying on a belief in him.

It seems the only way out of this box is more, not less information. We need to know who released the information; what the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel intended when they entered into a partnership with Wikileaks to spread this around; what the contemporaneous Iranian, Saudi, Russian, Chinese and Pakistani intercepts were over the same period of time. You want to see both boxers in the ring, not one in which Rocky Marciano fights a digitally missing opponent dishing out punches into the air and taking hits from invisible hands.

Then we’ll see who the good guys are. Or maybe that everyone’s a bad guy. But we’re never going to get a full picture with information flows going one way.

We need a way to “pull” more data into the public view instead of waiting for the Benevolent Dictators for Life of world opinion to “push” their check-ins into the Blessed Repository of the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. Who are these guys checking-in the info? Can we download the branches and the history of the thing or do we take it as black box? We base our political architecture on information we would not not trust to design a bicycle.

In a world where information cannot be secret the only chance at leveling the field is to let her rip. There can’t be secrecy for some and ‘transparency’ for others.