“The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) began providing public access to the Starr report on Friday, September 11, 1998, following the enactment of U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 525 authorizing public disclosure.”

--U.S. GPO news release

The book “Freakonomics,” contains an account of Stetson Kennedy, who single-handedly weakened the Ku Klux Klan during the 1930s by infiltrating the organization, learning all their secret passwords and handshakes, then arranging with the producers of the Superman radio program to broadcast them as part of a series on Superman versus the KKK.  “Freakonomics” authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner observed that today Kennedy would have used the Internet to reveal such information.

Today’s equivalent of Stetson Kennedy would be Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  More accurately, Pfc. Bradley Manning, who dumped the information on Wikileaks is the equivalent of Kennedy, and Wikileaks is the equivalent of the Superman radio show.  In governments, as in the KKK, secrecy creates a sense of power.  Like Toto pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, exposure reveals all such power as an illusion.

That’s why, on Sept. 11, 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, voted to release to the Internet the Starr report detailing Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinski.  

In a recent Fox interview, Gingrich described Assange as an “enemy combatant.”

As a former computer programmer, involved in some of the original testing of the Internet, I chuckled at Gingrinch’s attempt to pin responsibility on President Obama for the accessibility of classified documents.  Software takes a long time to write, test and implement.  Government bureaucracy that most likely exists in the military would slow that process even further.  Any software in use by the Army last year would have been developed during the Bush or possibly even the Clinton or Bush I Administration.

Gingrich is shocked!  Shocked! that a private in Army Intelligence has access to intelligence!   

Leave it to Gingrich to portray personal embarrassment as a national security threat.  His release of the Starr report pulls the pillowcase off his head to reveal his own contempt for “national security.”  Besides, a government that forces grandmothers and children to parade virtually naked through airport scanners, or to have their genitals groped, has no grounds to complain about Wikileaks.