During the 21st century, technologies that were once the domain of futuristic spy movies and science fiction have become commonplace. Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone was once so outlandish it was a joke. Now the very idea of it is ridiculously arcane; most people already have something that’s more like a communicator from Star Trek, except it’s also a camera, a jukebox, and a dozen other things.
But the result of these new technologies hasn’t been inter-planetary relations. Instead, it has led to, among other things, a new era of peeping tom entertainment. The likes of TMZ, Perez Hilton, and countless other gossip mongers specialize in celebrity exposes ranging from the ho-hum to the humiliating. No one is safe, nothing is off limits, as fancy gadgets are the tools for a spy game where the goal isn’t acquiring state secrets, just shallow and titillating entertainment.
But what if it were about state secrets? What if, instead of TMZ dishing on Lindsay Lohan, it was WikiLeaks exposing the U.S. State Department?
WikiLeaks is related to something like TMZ in the way a Michelin-rated restaurant is related to McDonalds. They both serve food, but that’s about where it ends. The non-profit 
organization headed by Julian Assange has had a clear and direct mission since its birth in 2006. WikiLeaks publishes the unpublishable, and does so with a purpose. It is dedicated to revealing that which large institutions would like to keep secret. WikiLeaks is not showing us the warts of meaningless celebrities, it is shining a light on the darker corners of complex organizations that have a profound impact on the world we live in. It is not seeking to profit by appealing to prurient interests, it is forgoing profit for the sake of an ideal: that large and important organizations, whether they be democratic or corporate, civil or military, are accountable to the people from whom they derive their profits, power, and/or legitimacy. It seeks to ensure that whistle blowers, 
journalists, and their sources have a safe haven to publish sensitive material, a venue that will maintain their anonymity and safeguard them from prosecution. And for its work, WikiLeaks has been honored with awards from groups as diverse as The Economist magazine and Amnesty International. In just a few short years, it has gathered and released millions of documents.
WikiLeaks’ debuted by exposing a Somali Sheik’s decision to assassinate government officials. Since then it has released material about corruption in Kenya; illegal banking activities in Switzerland; corporate and government corruption in Peru; a major nuclear 
accident in Iran; toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast; banking scandals in Iceland; and the cultish shenanigans of Scientology. It has also published standard operating procedures manual for Guantanamo Bay; the Yahoo email account of Sarah Palin (not mere gossip, Palin was violating Alaskan law by sending work-related messages through a private email account); the membership list of Great Britain’s racist, far-right British National Party; the so-called “ClimateGate” emails of scientists at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University; Pentagon messages from September 11; some 92,000 documents from the war in Afghanistan; and documents from the United Nations and the Congressional Research Service.
An international, non-profit organization that can operate without having to answer to shareholders or government officials, WikiLeaks is in a position to unleash materials that 
news organizations are unwilling to, or are not even capable of acquiring. One example is the U.S. military’s killing of at least a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad on July 12, 2007. Among those killed were two local staff members of the Reuters news agency whose cameras were mistaken for guns; one of them was killed after he had been seriously wounded and comrades were trying to rescue him. Reuters tried to obtain video of the event through the Freedom of Information Act but was unsuccessful. WikiLeaks obtained the footage and released it, allowing people to confront the hard truths of a tragic event, which official U.S. reports had obscured.
Of course such actions draw retribution. There has been a police raid in Germany, a shutdown in Thailand, a threatened blacklisting in Australia, and of course the de rigeur censorship in China. Ironically, WikiLeaks has even released a 2008 U.S. Department of Defense counterintelligence report that developed strategies for undermining WikiLeaks.
But as a result of the recent State Department leaks, the retribution has been more severe. 
Governments around the world have sabotaged its websites. The French Industry Minister tried to ban the site from France, though a French court ruled against it. Such persecution has taken a toll. There have been disruptions to WikiLeaks’ website service. Corporations large and small, from PayPal (a subsidiary of Ebay) to MasterCard and Amazon, have denied the organization its services. Several of these have admitted that the U.S. government had pressured them to do so.
But why this slow tightening of the noose instead of a more direct and immediate approach? Why not a cloak and a dagger in a dark cobblestoned alley? After all, there’s no shortage of governments upset by this, and many of them, including the United States, are not averse to making someone disappear from time to time. Well, Assange is now too famous to be killed and 
martyred, or even hustled off to some overseas third party prison by black ops. But why haven’t enraged American officials hauled him in on espionage charges? Why this understated game of each side pushing proxies to launch cyber attacks, plus some murky charges against Assange about unexpected and unprotected sexual relations with two women in Sweden?
Attorney General Eric Holder is making excuses about not having the right laws on the books, which is laughable. The real reason, at least part of it, is probably because WikiLeaks claims it has a 1.4 gigabyte “insurance” file: tens of thousands of documents, potentially far more embarrassing to various world governments than anything publicly released thus far. The organization maintains that this file is replicated in thousands of locations, and it will be turned loose if Assange or the organization is seriously harmed.
Well lo and behold, this is starting to take the shape of a Cold War spy thriller after all. Get your shoe phones ready.