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Hey WikiLeaks! Where's My Shockwave Rider App?
The recent release of a quarter-million recent confidential American diplomatic cables has brought the hidden world of diplomacy into sharp focus this past week. WikiLeaks is a non-profit organization that publishes material from confidential sources.
The WikiLeaks material is available to anyone with a web browser.
In his 1975 book The Shockwave Rider, sf author John Brunner details a scenario in which a computer hacker writes a special computer tapeworm that brings out hidden government data and then presents it to the user during ordinary computer use:
AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON
YOUR OVERDUE-TAX DEMAND
For the information of the person required to pay this tax:
Analysis of last year's federal budget shows that:
***17% of your tax dollar went on boondoggles
***13% on propaganda, bribes and kickbacks
***11% on federal contracts with companies which are a) fronting for criminal activities and/or b) partly or wholly owned by persons subject to indictment for federal offences and/or c) hazardous to health and the environment. Fuller details may be obtained by punching the code number at top left of this form into any veephone. They take about 57 minutes to present.
(Read more about Brunner's government data transparency)
So, what we need now is a suitable mash-up app for our phones that will pull down appropriate WikiLeaked data during our web surfing. Developers?
From WikiLeaks via NYTimes; thanks to Winchell Chung for pointing out this story.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/30/2010)
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