JSPES, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter 2011)
pp. 455-471

2011 CyberAnarchism, WikiLeaks and Computer Warfare: The Unprecedented Dangers Associated with Information Technology Today

Dwight D. Murphey

Wichita State University, retired

Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Crown Publishers

Daniel Domscheit-Berg has written a book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website that deserves a review in itself. Readers become acquainted with the highly organized and yet free-wheeling world community of “computer hackers,” a community motivated by what might best be described as “CyberAnarchism.” Most especially, Domscheit-Berg tells the story of WikiLeaks and his long involvement with it as its number-two man. As most everyone knows, WikiLeaks has made itself the platform for the electronic publication of vast numbers of confidential or secret documents sent to it from undisclosed sources. The story of the hacker community, and of WikiLeaks as a part of it, is worth knowing in itself, but additional facts tell us that that is just part of a much larger phenomenon, one that regrettably is even more chilling than the threat of nuclear warfare that has hung over the world since 1945. The exploration of that larger aspect is why this is expanded beyond a discussion of Domscheit-Berg’s book into an article of much broader scope.