Since 9/11 the buzzword for governments around the world cooperating with each other, but also for national agencies working together, was data sharing. That was considered one of the major lessons of the terrorist attacks of 2001: The various governments and government agencies around the world which collect various pieces of information, need to share and evaluate all their available data together to get a full picture of upcoming threats or unfolding events.

That assessment, that when push comes to shove, information sharing is more important than the risk of misuse by information being distributed too widely was a key reason for the complete overhaul of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the US as well as in many other countries.

In the wake of the current WikiLeaks data deluge, however, that basic tenet of transparency and information sharing could come under threat.

"No doubt you'll see some backlash," Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO and currently Managing Director at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, told Deutsche Welle. "People will look at this and say we have to do a better job protecting secret information in order to have access to information."

Chilling effect

Already governments have announced that they will evaluate and improve how they gather, share and store important information. In the US, for instance, that will mean that the number of people who have access to information will be slashed considerably.

What's more, international officials, politicians and business leaders will also be more careful in what they divulge to their US counterparts, says Volker, who calls this a chilling effect for US diplomacy.

So could we face a situation again where the urge for secrecy and compartmentalization of information trumps transparency and thereby hampers the international fight against terrorism and organized crime?

"I think that that would be an overreaction frankly," says Volker. "I think that we need to be able to access and use information wisely and the trick is going to be to provide greater confidence that it's going to be kept secure."

No complete data security

While there certainly will be efforts to further curtail the dissemination of information and to improve the safety of sensitive data, there is a limit to what can be achieved.

"We know that electronic data are never as secure as data put on paper," Jeanette Hofmann, an Internet analyst at the Social Science Research Center Berlin who also serves as an expert with the Internet commission of the German parliament, told Deutsche Welle. "It is never 100 percent secure, because it always relies on encryption and encryption can be decrypted."

But reverting back to more face-to-face or phone conversations instead of writing everything down and mailing it around as some people have suggested is not feasible either.

"I think phone conversations probably suffer from similar problems because as more and more networks are switched to Internet transmission we face similar problems," says Hofmann.

No alternative to electronic communication

In addition, it is simply not possible to eschew electronic communication despite its obvious drawbacks, adds Volker:

"Because the advantage that you get from the use of the Internet and electronic communication is speed," he says. "The disadvantage is that it is much harder to protect information. But if you go for 100 percent protection by going back to paper copies or face-to-face meetings you lose considerable speed."

For the experts, that means that the struggle over information between governments and whistleblowers will continue - despite all short-term efforts to better secure sensitive data and regardless of whether WikiLeaks itself will be around in the future.

Author: Michael Knigge
Editor: Rob Mudge