Quintin Jardine's blog

I’ve been known to suggest on public platforms that man’s three greatest inventions have been, chronologically, the wheel, the condom and the internet. But when great inventions become universally available, great danger can follow. For example, the first has carried many a hostile force into peaceful territory, while the second lulls users into a sense of security that can sometimes be false. The third? In a word, Wikileaks. I’m all for freedom of information, but I’m also for realism when it comes to national security. It’s not up to individuals to decide what secrets a state keeps, it’s a matter for the government of that state. If  the majority want to change that policy, then it’s up to them to change the government if necessary.

If a guy like Julian Assange, a convicted computer hacker, is given material that he knows is restricted and must have been obtained illegally, and chooses to circulate it on his website, regardless of the consequences for the states, organisations and individuals affected without editing or discriminating, what does that make him? Some would say it makes him a terrorist. I have sympathy with that view, but I’d prefer to suggest that his disregard for national and individual rights to privacy, and most particularly for any statutes that protect them, is best described as the behaviour of an outlaw. But not the Robin Hood type, not a socialist with a bow and arrow; oh no, he’s a highwayman, pure Dick Turpin, pure Billy the Kid, completely ruthless in his readiness to appropriate the property of others. There’s nothing romantic about this guy. Most countries have data protection legislation to stop people like him. Yet look what’s happened since he’s been arrested. Regardless of the fact that the charges he’s facing have nothing to do with the Wikileaks operation, his followers, his acolytes, his would-be merry ****ing men, are launching cyber attacks on organisations they perceive to be ‘the enemy’.

In my eyes, (maybe my site will be attacked for my saying this) they really are terrorists, and it’s time that national governments joined forces to shit on them from a very great height.