“The innovation is the placing of these documents into one place and in a database which can be searched by the public. That makes them accessible in a way not seen in the past.”
Wikileaks publishes 1.7m US diplomatic records
Wikileaks says it has created the world's largest searchable collection of US diplomatic documents
Wikileaks has published more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence reports from the 1970s.
They include allegations that former Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi was a middleman in an arms deal and the first impressions of eventual British PM Margaret Thatcher.
The documents have not been leaked and are available to view at the US national archives.
Wikileaks says it is releasing the documents in searchable form.
Much of the work has been carried out by the website's founder Julian Assange while he has been holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
Phi Beta Iota: Next up — and scaring the crap out of the Department of Justice that fears the truth with a passion — are all US Government contracts with all US vendors showing all deals. The information industry has been stupid for the past 40 years, insisting on pushing proprietary tools and truncated data instead of sense-making. As with the earlier report, on Barrett Brown's Intelligence Research site, this is another sign that public intelligence is coming — the public is going to rip big data apart in ways and at a speed that the current pedestrian minds in industry can simply not fathom.
- Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths. And the particular truth in which they need instruction today is that new means for meeting the largest problems on earth have to be created.
- Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power (1987), pg. 207)
