"Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared....

"But when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don't care much. Our privacy is expendable. It is no surprise that the reaction to these leaks is different. What has changed the dynamic of power in a revolutionary way isn't just the scale of the databases being kept, but that individuals can upload a copy and present it to the world. In paper form, these cables amount to some 13,969 pages, which would stack about 25m high – not something that one could have easily slipped past security in the paper age....

"This is a revolution, and all revolutions create fear and uncertainty. Will we move to a New Information Enlightenment or will the backlash from those who seek to maintain control no matter the cost lead us to a new totalitarianism?  What happens in the next five years will define the future of democracy for the next century, so it would be well if our leaders responded to the current challenge with an eye on the future."

'Revolution' may be hyperbole but access to data is shifting the balance of power. Governments need to wake up to the idea that sharing their public data with us will help us develop while at the same time, they need to house the individual data they hold about us in smaller, more secure silos.

My hope is that governments' embarassment will encourage them to start taking the privacy of OUR data a bit more seriously.