Shhh.
Power starts with a secret.
One of the most interesting books to read in the entire history of modern culture is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which describes a new social machine designed to organize human beings around principles of discipline.
The Panopticon was a prison.
But Bentham also noted that it was perfect for schools, barracks, work-houses, factories and hospitals.
Just about everything!
And why shouldn't most parts of modern life resemble a prison?
The setup of a Panopticon is simple:
It's a ring-shaped building of multiple stories where the warden occupies a central tower. The cells of the building face inward toward the tower and are exposed through a open wall. There is no space in the cell where occupants of the building cannot be seen by the warden, which allows their activities to be monitored at all times.
Well -- that sounds right, for a prison.
But here is the innovation:
The warden sits behind windows covered with Venetian blinds, so that he himself is never seen by the occupants of the building.
Prisoners, students, soldiers, workers -- no inmate of the Panopticon can ever be sure of whether he or she is being watched. As a result, the occupants must behave as if the warden were all-seeing. They discipline themselves according to the regulation of the institution, regardless of whether or not the warden is actually in the tower or not.
Power starts with a secret:
But the secret is not necessarily a fact, like the kind of facts you might learn from reading a leaked government cable.
The real secret is the knowledge of who the government is spying on, and when, what means they use to spy, and what are the consequences.
This is what world governments fear about Wikileaks.
They don't care if some second-tier attache in Kazakhstan is caught making snarky observations about the dictator of the day.
They care about the curtain being pulled back on the machineries of surveillance.
Julian Assange refers to this power relation as "the invisible government."
So it is.
It's also one of the principles that serves as a foundation for the modern world -- the social, psychological world.
If inmates of the world institution know who is watching, and when, and how, they will pattern their behavior after the surveillance so as to elude it.
This leads to an erosion -- however big, however small -- of the disciplined order that sits on top of our democracy. This the politico-economic elites will preserve at all costs. Not through any sort of conspiracy, but as a natural consequence of all of them, individually and together, looking after their own interests.
That's the threat of Wikileaks.