There you are. In American geographical terms this road is “near London”.
A bit of a tease?
Well, so are the Wikleaks cables if today’s “sensation” is anything to go by.
It’s an alleged list of facilities “critical” to the US national interest.
Well the “F” list that is. The UK ones could be culled from a twenty minute Google search. Most of them have been on Wikipedia for years. The list omits the really major stuff. I can think, off hand, of three major installations which are not on the list. It’s a sort of civil list.
So why do it? Why leaks these cables? I am still trying to understand that.
Anonymong has some interesting thoughts on the matter:
Wikileaks presents itself as serving public interest, but what public interest is there in releasing the sort of list that anyone who was interested in could probably produce on their own? As observed over at Harry’s place it’s not exactly a major security issue, but it’s not exactly helpful – either for the security forces or on the grounds of public interest. With some past leaks the public interest angle is obvious, but the positive benefit of this leak is harder to see, except maybe to save some conspiracy theorists and rival spooks a few hours work.
When looking at the recent leaks in particular it’s worth remembering the early mission statement of WikiLeaks:
“Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.”This list of facilities is hardly unethical, the other days leak of cables didn’t seem to cover much if anything unethical (though there were some exceptions) and again nothing much that a moments thought wouldn’t cause a reaction of “No shit Sherlock!”.
PS. In case you wondered, that isn’t a random bit of road in the photo above. It genuinely is part of a road leading up to a facility referenced in today’s Wikileaks “critical facilities” cable. And it is “near London”. Honest!
Liberal Burblings 
Why? Well, there’s a certain part of hacker culture which does it simply because one *can*. And personally, I think there’s something seriously unethical about governments which gather up vast amounts of sensitive information and then leave it lying around in databases which can be easily compromised, either by infiltration or negligence. It may be diplomatic cables in this case, but it could just as easily be personal details of citizens (thinks: ID cards, NHS database, Contactpoint). Wikileaks ought to be a massive wake-up call to the public as to just how exposed we all are.
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