Jim Garrettson
Watching the trends and waves of popular evolutionary Internet patterns in government contracting from a publisher’s desk, the WikiLeaks story has created a booming crash on the beach of fear, uncertainty and doubt (aka FUD).
While the average American may be thinking, as casual observers of an international event, the WikiLeaks disaster’s effect on them personally is as distant a calamity as the underwear bomber, most don’t see where the trend line leads.
While they are busily populating their Facebook, the companies they work for are furiously web enabling and the U.S. government is diving into the cloud, we are witnessing an unprecedented level of interconnected information available for the taking.
The perfect storm will rise to an extreme level of danger when the following trend lines intersect: Web 2.0, cloud computing and cybersecurity. Web 2.0 brings all information off our “protected” desktops and shares it across a web-enabled cloud of shared applications. This new multiplex of interconnected information will need to be checked and protected by the tools of cybersecurity forces, and access must be be granted as a way of protecting the many from the isolated threats. Now, we all feel safer.
Or maybe not.
The threat of the next FUD wave will be the “trusted source.” Like Private Bradley Manning, who allegedly used his status as a trusted source to steal and distribute the mother lode of confidential information from our protected government sources and placed it in the hands of a “not so trusted” source, WikiLeaks.
We will begin following this trend more closely in future issues and look forward to your thoughts and comments on the topic.
