This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 9, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

The WikiLeaks leaker, whether intentionally or not, revealed a flaw in military security, certainly made

worse by unprecedented connectivity for most of us.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, says that the U.S. security strategy

may be focusing too much on keeping lots and lots of information secret and not enough on

deciding which information needs to be truly secure.

Recently a website called WikiLeaks.org released thousands and thousands of documents

that recorded military events in Africa. documents that were treated as secret by the US military but had been at least allegedly released by a military member who was apparently as it so typical in these cases some kind of disgruntled person who had access to secret documents.

WikiLeaks is a site that's set up to allow people to upload documents.

It uses clever and complicated encryption and protocols to allow people to upload anonymously

and to participate in discussion about documents.

In one sense, it's a terrific site because it does allow for whistleblowers to

to release documents that they otherwise couldn't and so you force transparency on

governments for example.

On the other hand that kind of transparency can do a lot of damage and my colleague David

Ritgers seemed none too happy about the fact that military secrets were released in this latest episode.

So the balance there is one that I don't want to call,

but I think that people should be aware that this is essentially the future.

This is how it's going to be for a pair of related reasons.

The first is technology driven. Today, far more than even just a decade ago,

people have access to very powerful technologies.

Two gigabit thumb drives that they can fit in their pocket just a little bit larger than a door key.

...