Insurance Fraud Costs £2.3m Every Day

11:47am UK, Wednesday December 29, 2010

Michael Burgess, Sky News Online

Insurance companies are uncovering an average of 335 fraudulent claims every day, says a report.

According to the Association of British Insurers, the claims, which are being detected with increasingly sophisticated techniques, are costing £2.3m every day.

The most common type of insurance fraud is home insurance, says the report, with 170 bogus claims made each day.

Fraudulent home insurance claims usually involve people claiming for alleged accidental damage to carpets or furniture - such as spilled red wine or coffee - only for insurers to find the damage was done deliberately.

The second most common type of insurance fraud was motor insurance, with 108 fraudulent claims made each day, costing approximately £1.1m.

Insurance cheats do not prosper – they can expect to get caught, face problems getting future insurance and risk getting a criminal record.

Nick Starling, of the Association of British Insurers

Speaking to Sky News, Malcolm Tarling, of the Association of British Insurers, said: "We've had people who have travelled overseas and claimed for stolen cameras and items they’ve never had."

He said some people also "spill paint and coffee on carpets and then claimed for the complete refurbishment of the home".

One claimant crashed his car during a race at the Nuerburgring race track in Germany, but shipped it back to the UK to claim it was damaged at the side of the road in Britain.

Another policy holder alleged he had sustained a head injury after tripping over a loose paving stone, only for it to emerge he had been hit by a baseball bat during a fight.

Carpets are being deliberately damaged for bogus insurance claims

Nick Starling, also of the Association of British Insurers, said: "Insurance cheats do not prosper – they can expect to get caught, face problems getting future insurance and risk getting a criminal record."

He added: "The majority of customers are honest and rightly object to subsidising the cheats. Insurance fraud adds and extra £44 to the average UK household’s annual insurance bill.

"This is why 2011 will see insurers intensify their war against the cheats to protect their honest customers."

The 10 best video games of 2010

By Scott Steinberg, Special to CNN December 29, 2010 -- Updated 1240 GMT (2040 HKT) | Filed under: Gaming & Gadgets

"Red Dead Redemption" wows with its atmospheric setting, wealth of play styles and gritty take on gunslinger culture.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• CNN gaming contributor Scott Steinberg offers his favorite video games of the year
• "Rock Band 3" introduces keyboards and more realistic instrument play
• "Halo: Reach" has a raft of endlessly entertaining online multiplayer modes
• "FIFA 11" brings the World Cup to life for soccer fans, he says

Editor's note: Scott Steinberg is the head of technology and video game consulting firm TechSavvy Global, as well as the founder of GameExec magazine and Game Industry TV. The creator and host of online video series Game Theory, he frequently appears as an on-air technology analyst for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN.

(CNN) -- From an explosion of social games and iPhone apps to the rise of motion controls, cloud computing and retro revivals, 2010 has been a year of surprises and revelations for gaming enthusiasts.

But it's also been a generous one to PC and home console owners, with dozens of gob-smacking titles available for almost every system.

Between the launch of long-awaited epics such as "Gran Turismo 5" and "BioShock 2," and the return of heavyweights such as "NBA Jam" and "GoldenEye 007," choosing the year's top 10 titles is a Herculean task.

It's doubly so when you consider how subjective every player's list is, with one man's "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" another's "Fallout: New Vegas."

That said, here are the 10 games that most captured my attention this year, whether through technical innovation or sheer thumb-waggling goodness.

Which ones make your own personal best list? Be sure to write in and let us know in the comments section below.

1. "Heavy Rain" (Sony, PlayStation 3) -- An interactive thriller that raises the bar for adventure gaming by injecting genuine choice and emotion into its suspenseful nonlinear narrative. It features storytelling that's every bit as gripping and cinematic as anything Hollywood produces.

2. "Red Dead Redemption" (Rockstar Games, PlayStation 3/Xbox 360) -- The game industry's equivalent of a Spaghetti Western, this sprawling open-world tale of outlaw justice wows with its atmospheric setting, wealth of play styles and gritty take on gunslinger culture.

Kids of all ages can't resist the cartoon charms of Super Mario Galaxy 2.

3. "Super Mario Galaxy 2" (Nintendo, Wii) -- The cartoon Italian stallion rides high again, bounding about 3-D candy-colored worlds collecting coins, swiping power-ups and using dinosaur pal Yoshi's prehensile tongue to battle enemies. This is his best platform-hopping escapade since "Super Mario 64."

4. "Mass Effect 2" (Electronic Arts, PC/Xbox 360) -- An entire galaxy's worth of colorful characters, clever dialogue and gripping plotlines await in this futuristic role-playing odyssey, whose tale skillfully straddles the line between detailed stat-crunching and action-packed gunplay.

5. "Rock Band 3" (MTV Games, PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/Wii) -- A high note for even the critically acclaimed music game franchise, this installment outdoes itself by introducing keyboards, more realistic instrument play and countless ways to live out your MTV fantasies.

6. "Call of Duty: Black Ops" (Activision, PC/PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/Wii) -- Rewinds the best-selling first-person shooter series to the Cold War era, ratchets up the pyrotechnics and, most importantly, offers months of trigger-mashing replay value by providing millions of willing online victims.

FIFA 11 will appeal to anyone who still misses last summer's World Cup.

7. "FIFA 11" (EA Sports, PC/PlayStation 2/PlayStation3/PSP/Xbox 360) -- Brings home the virtual World Cup with its lifelike athletes, simple yet deep design mechanics and spirited online play, making it a fast, fun and surprisingly accessible choice, however comfortable you are in cleats.

8. "God of War 3" (Sony, PlayStation 3) -- Say what you will about its bucketfuls of blood, histrionic rage and penchant for melodrama, but this gory Greek tragedy delivers some of the most brutal button-mashing mayhem ever seen on home consoles.

9. "StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty" (Blizzard, PC) -- Roughly 12 years in the making and so big it had to be split into three parts, this futuristic real-time strategy epic stunned critics by actually living up to the hype. In an age of kinder, gentler social and casual titles, it also underscored hardcore PC gaming's continued relevance and appeal.

10. "Halo: Reach" (Microsoft, Xbox 360) -- Despite sticking to the by-now-familiar sci-fi run-n-gun formula, this sequel offered massive, multitiered stages and a raft of endlessly entertaining online multiplayer modes to ensure you'll be ventilating squealing aliens well into 2011.

Facebook in challenge to Google crown

Facebook is challenging Google's supremacy on the Internet with a radically different approach to how people live, work, play and search online.

Facebook has been facing off with Google on the hiring front, forcing the Mountain View, California-based Google to recently raise salaries by 10 percent across the board.

Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room six years ago and is now worth an estimated 6.9 billion dollars, refers to it as the "social graph."

AFP - Facebook is challenging Google's supremacy on the Internet with a radically different approach to how people live, work, play and search online.

While Google delivers search results selected by algorithms that take into account a user's Web history, Facebook boasts a richer level of personalization based on one's own "likes" and the recommendations of Facebook friends.

Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room six years ago and is now worth an estimated 6.9 billion dollars, refers to it as the "social graph."

"I think what we've found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about they tend to be more engaging," Zuckerberg said in an interview with the CBS show "60 Minutes."

"The social graph is incredibly broad," said Wedbush Securities social media analyst Lou Kerner, picking up on Zuckerberg's favorite phrase. "It includes not only what you do and what you like but people you know and what they like and the companies you interact with."

For some Internet watchers like Kerner, Facebook is constructing a parallel network built around the interactions of its more than 500 million members.

"I refer to Facebook as the second Internet, maybe more valuable than the first because we're all interconnected on it," Kerner told AFP.

"Social media is an increasingly important part of how you reach people and it's a growing part of every marketer's budget," he said.

"The idea is you do not want to fight Facebook, you want to embrace Facebook and leverage Facebook because this is where people are going to spend increasing amounts of time," he said.

According to online tracking firm comScore, Google receives more unique monthly visitors than Facebook but visitors to Facebook spend more time at the site than they do on Google properties.

Since early 2010, Facebook has been rolling out features which put it on a collision course with Google -- an @facebook.com email service which competes with Google's Gmail and "Facebook Questions," a search engine of sorts which lets Facebook members ask questions and get answers from other members.

Facebook has also been facing off with Google on the hiring front, forcing the Mountain View, California-based Google to recently raise salaries by 10 percent across the board.

"They've become competitive in some areas, but it's not that Facebook has grown at Google's expense or that Facebook is growing and Google is shrinking," said Danny Sullivan, editor of technology blog SearchEngineLand.com.

"Google is not going away," agreed Kerner. "Google, in fact, I think is going to benefit from the emergence of social media.

"Because what it's doing is it's driving people to spend more time online and when you?re spending more time online, you end up doing more searches," he said.

"Where they've really been encroaching on each other more is in the display space," Sullivan said. "Facebook has a lot of people who buy display advertising. Google wants to sell more display advertising."

Sullivan also said Google "has been trying to encroach on their social area, but they haven't been very successful."

Zuckerberg, who was named earlier this month as the Time magazine person of the year, acknowledged to CBS "there are areas where the companies compete."

"But then, there are all these areas where we just don't compete at all," he said.

Time managing editor Richard Stengel said Zuckerberg -- the second youngest person named to the cover of Time's ritual annual issue -- and his social networking service were "transforming the way we live our lives every day."

Facebook's growth is not necessarily a bad thing for Google, which has been coming under increased scrutiny from anti-trust authorities in both the United States and Europe.

"Some of it plays very well for Google," Sullivan said. "Google is able to say, 'You know, we have this stiff competition out there.'

"It's not necessarily to Google's disadvantage that Facebook is growing."

Forecasters keep eye on looming 'Solar Max'

A NASA image of an eruption on the Sun. The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence.

The sun rises at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Two centuries of observing sunspots -- dark, relatively cool marks on the solar face linked to mighty magnetic forces -- have revealed that our star follows a roughly 11-year cycle of behaviour. The latest cycle began in 1996 and for reasons which are unclear has taken longer than expected to end.

A NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) image of the Sun. Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest.

AFP - The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence.

Many people may be surprised to learn that the Sun, rather than burn with faultless consistency, goes through moments of calm and tempest.

But two centuries of observing sunspots -- dark, relatively cool marks on the solar face linked to mighty magnetic forces -- have revealed that our star follows a roughly 11-year cycle of behaviour.

The latest cycle began in 1996 and for reasons which are unclear has taken longer than expected to end.

Now, though, there are more and more signs that the Sun is shaking off its torpor and building towards "Solar Max," or the cycle's climax, say experts.

"The latest prediction looks at around midway 2013 as being the maximum phase of the solar cycle," said Joe Kunches of NASA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

But there is a prolonged period of high activity, "more like a season, lasting about two and a half years," either side of the peak, he cautioned.

At its angriest, the Sun can vomit forth tides of electromagnetic radiation and charged matter known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

This shock wave may take several days to reach Earth. When it arrives, it compresses the planet's protective magnetic field, releasing energy visible in high latitudes as shimmering auroras -- the famous Northern Lights and Southern Lights.

But CMEs are not just pretty events.

They can unleash static discharges and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt or even knock out the electronics on which our urbanised, Internet-obsessed, data-saturated society depends.

Less feared, but also a problem, are solar flares, or eruptions of super-charged protons that can reach Earth in just minutes.

In the front line are telecommunications satellites in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of 36,000 kilometres (22,500 miles) and Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, on which modern airliners and ships depend for navigation, which orbit at 20,000 kms (12,000 miles).

In January 1994, discharges of static electricity inflicted a five-month, 50-million-dollar outage of a Canadian telecoms satellite, Anik-E2.

In April 2010, Intelsat lost Galaxy 15, providing communications over North America, after the link to ground control was knocked out apparently by solar activity.

"These are the two outright breakdowns that we all think about," said Philippe Calvel, an engineer with the French firm Thales. "Both were caused by CMEs."

In 2005, X-rays from a solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and GPS signals for about 10 minutes.

To cope with solar fury, satellite designers opt for robust, tried-and-tested components and shielding, even if this makes the equipment heavier and bulkier and thus costlier to launch, said Thierry Duhamel of satellite maker Astrium.

Another precaution is redundancy -- to have backup systems in case one malfunctions.

On Earth, power lines, data connections and even oil and gas pipelines are potentially vulnerable.

An early warning of the risk came in 1859, when the biggest CME ever observed unleashed red, purple and green auroras even in tropical latitudes.

The new-fangled technology of the telegraph went crazy. Geomagnetically-induced currents in the wires shocked telegraph operators and even set the telegraph paper on fire.

In 1989, a far smaller flare knocked out power from Canada's Hydro Quebec generator, inflicting a nine-hour blackout for six million people.

A workshop in 2008 by US space weather experts, hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, heard that a major geomagnetic storm would dwarf the 2005 Hurricane Katrina for costs.

Recurrence of a 1921 event today would fry 350 major transformers, leaving more than 130 million people without power, it heard. A bigger storm could cost between a trillion and two trillion dollars in the first year, and full recovery could take between four and 10 years.

"I think there is some hyperbole about the draconian effects," said Kunches.

"On the other hand, there's a lot we don't know about the Sun. Even in the supposedly declining, or quiet phase, you can have magnetic fields on the Sun that get very concentrated and energised for a time, and you can get, out of the blue, eruptive activity that is atypical. In short, we have a variable star."

Organ traffickers target Nepal's poorest

Nepalese farmer, Madhab Parajuli, who sold one of his kidneys is seen in the impoverished town of Kavre. "I didn't get paid until we got back to Nepal, and then only around a third of what I'd been promised," the 36-year-old told AFP in his home village of Jyamdi, close to Kathmandu.

A Nepalese child eats rice in the village of Sawa Khola. Many people live in poverty in the land-locked Himalayan nation.

Seven years ago, Nepalese farmer Madhab Parajuli faced an agonising choice: lose his small plot of farmland to mounting debts, or sell one of his kidneys to an organ trafficker.

AFP - Seven years ago, Nepalese farmer Madhab Parajuli faced an agonising choice: lose his small plot of farmland to mounting debts, or sell one of his kidneys to an organ trafficker.

In desperation, Parajuli accepted the trafficker's offer of 100,000 rupees (1,400 dollars) and travelled to India to have the organ removed -- a decision he now bitterly regrets.

"I didn't get paid until we got back to Nepal, and then only around a third of what I'd been promised," the 36-year-old told AFP in his home village of Jyamdi, around 30 miles (50 kilometres) east of the capital Kathmandu.

"I lost my farm anyway, and if I'd known then what I know now, there's no way I would have sold my kidney."

Parajuli, whose family abandoned him after he lost all his property, looks frail and haggard. Now a day labourer, he said he finds heavy work difficult.

"I occasionally feel the pain on the side," he said, pointing to the six-inch (15 cm) scar on his right side.

Under Nepalese law, kidney transplants are allowed only if the organ is donated by a blood relative or spouse.

But India's laws are more lax, allowing a non-relative to donate an organ "out of affection", subject to the approval of a medical committee -- a checking process which can often be circumvented.

Everyone knows someone who has given up a kidney in Jyamdi, one of a cluster of impoverished villages in Nepal that have become a centre for the traders because of the proximity to Kathmandu and the Indian border.

Most of the villagers are subsistence farmers, but many cannot produce enough food for the whole year, and are forced to seek work in Kathmandu or neighbouring India.

"The organ traffickers trawl the villages looking for poor donors like Madhab," former village chief Krishna Bahadur Tamang told AFP.

"People here are poor and uneducated so it's easy. But in most cases they get only a tiny fraction of the money they were promised."

Some are even lured into India with cover stories, and only told the true purpose of their journey once they are over the border.

That is what happened to Mohan Sapkota, who was initially told he would be paid to accompany a Nepalese kidney patient travelling to India for treatment.

He became suspicious when the trafficker told him he would have to undergo a blood test and a health check-up before travelling, but it was only after he arrived in the southern Indian city of Chennai that the true reason emerged.

"I had no money and no property and the trafficker promised to pay for my children's education, so I agreed to give up a kidney," Sapkota, 43, told AFP. "But in the end, all I got was 60,000 rupees."

Sociologist Ganesh Gurung has conducted research into organ trafficking in the district of Kavre, where the villages are located.

He says that once they are in India, the victims are even more vulnerable to the traffickers' demands.

"The donor is in a very weak position in India, where he often cannot understand the language and has little bargaining power," he said.

"And then when they get back to the village, many of them spend the money on alcohol."

A survey conducted by a local non-government organisation in 2009 put the number of people in Kavre who have sold a kidney at 300. No official statistics are available, but many people believe the true figure is much higher.

Many organs rackets in India cater for foreigners dubbed "transplant tourists", but most of the kidneys from Nepal are actually destined for Nepalese patients.

Wealthy Nepalese people suffering kidney diseases travel to India for the transplant operation, said Rishi Kumar Kafle, a Kathmandu doctor specialising in nephrology who is executive director of the National Kidney Center.

"In Nepal only the patient's blood relatives and spouse are eligible for kidney donation. Therefore, those looking for a donor outside this travel to India for transplant," he told AFP.

He said the paucity of healthcare in Nepal means kidney disease often goes undetected until it is too late, leaving the victim with a choice between expensive dialysis treatment or an illegal transplant.

Nepal's weak law enforcement and open border with India make it easy for the traffickers to ply their lucrative trade, and reports suggest a kidney can fetch up to 20,000 dollars on the black market.

Police say they have struggled to make any arrests because the traffickers live outside the area, but local farmer Raman Pariyar accused authorities of ignoring the illegal trade.

"Our village has developed a reputation as a place where you can buy kidney," he said.

"Local people see that you can give up a kidney and still try to live a healthy life. So, a prospective donor leaves the village first to Kathmandu and then to India and comes back with a scar in his side."

China cracks down on abuse at animal parks

A chimpanzee rides a bicycle at a zoo in Hefei in east China's Anhui province. China has stripped the licences of seven animal parks and ordered more than 50 others to crack down on abusive practices after inspections revealed a host of violations, state media said Wednesday.

A visitor looks at a white Manchurian tiger at a zoo in Beijing. Activists have for years railed against dire conditions in China's zoos and safari parks, and animal performances have caused particular concern.

AFP - China has stripped the licences of seven animal parks and ordered more than 50 others to crack down on abusive practices after inspections revealed a host of violations, state media said Wednesday.

The punishments came two months after the government had called on local authorities to ban animal performances in zoos and improve park management amid persistent concerns about the poor conditions in the nation's wildlife parks.

Since that announcement, six government teams inspected 500 animal parks nationwide -- and discovered mistreatment of animals, the illegal sale of wildlife products and cases of injuries to visitors, the China Daily said.

The report said those inspections revealed that shows at zoos had resulted in "frequent abuse and exploitation" of the animals.

"Both the security of endangered species and the safety of the public are threatened by improper management," the paper quoted the deputy head of the State Forestry Administration, Yin Hong, as saying.

China has roughly 700 zoos, wildlife parks and circuses that stage animal performances, attracting about 150 million visitors a year, according to the newspaper.

Activists have for years railed against dire conditions in China's zoos and safari parks, and animal performances have caused particular concern.

The Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation said earlier this year that showmen frequently whipped and struck animals during shows in China, "forcing them to carry out tricks that go against their natural behaviour".

Hua Ning, an official in the Beijing office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said the new restrictions were a "positive step".

"The government needs to help zoos and aquariums cancel some performances that entertain visitors but harm animals," Hua told the China Daily.

A series of scandals this year highlighted bad conditions in wildlife parks and prompted Beijing to draft the country's first animal protection law, which is still under consideration.

Earlier this year, 11 endangered Siberian tigers starved to death at a cash-strapped park in the northeastern province of Liaoning, where they were fed chicken bones, and two others were shot after they mauled a worker.

In nearby Heilongjiang province, authorities also uncovered a mass grave of animals -- including lions, tigers and leopards -- that died of illness and malnutrition at a wildlife park, state media reported.

WikiLeaks, a Napster-style Internet gamechanger for 2010

The homepage of Wikileaks.ch with a picture of its founder Julian Assange is seen on a computer screen on December 4, 2010 in Lausanne. If 1999 was the Year of Napster in the history of the Internet then 2010 will go down as the Year of WikiLeaks.

A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, points to his t-shirt outside London's High Court, on December 16, 2010. For now, WikiLeaks has governments, institutions and individuals around the world searching for answers to difficult questions surrounding US policy, free speech, Internet freedom, privacy, secrecy, transparency and the power -- and dangers -- of the Web.

File photo of a "Napster To Go Cafe" sign in Union Square, in 2005 in New York City. Napster, the file-sharing renegade, upended the music industry and copyright in ways still being felt a decade later while WikiLeaks, for better or worse, is likely to have a similar impact on government secrecy and transparency.

AFP - If 1999 was the Year of Napster in the history of the Internet then 2010 will go down as the Year of WikiLeaks.

Napster, the file-sharing renegade, upended the music industry and copyright in ways still being felt a decade later while WikiLeaks, for better or worse, is likely to have a similar impact on government secrecy and transparency.

For now, WikiLeaks has governments, institutions and individuals around the world searching for answers to difficult questions surrounding US policy, free speech, Internet freedom, privacy, secrecy, transparency and the power -- and dangers -- of the Web.

WikiLeaks has argued that its release of hundreds of thousands of secret US documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the inner workings of US diplomacy exposes US military abuses on the battlefield and "contradictions between the US's public persona and what it says behind closed doors."

Its detractors denounce the release of the documents as a crime carried out by a disgruntled US soldier and abetted by a self-appointed truth-teller in the person of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Clay Shirky, a prominent US writer on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, said he has mixed feelings about WikiLeaks although he staunchly opposes extrajudicial efforts to shut it down.

"Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about WikiLeaks," Shirky said in a blog post on his website, Shirky.com.

"Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name," Shirky said. "Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

"On the other hand, human systems can't stand pure transparency," he said. "People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon.

"Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities."

Assange is on bail in Britain fighting a bid by Sweden to extradite him over allegations of sexual assault made by two women. His strict bail conditions include reporting to police daily, and wearing an electronic tag.

Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of technology and politics blog techPresident.com, said he sees WikiLeaks as a "Napster moment in the evolution of how technology changes the relationship between people and their governments."

"The way in which we think about power itself is altered as a result of the Web," Rasiej told AFP.

"I would hope that after everything calms down that the government recognizes that it has to fight for openness and transparency and use classification only in rare occasions," he said.

Rasiej said he was concerned, however, that instead of embracing greater transparency, "governments may try to invoke a cure that may be worse than the disease."

Washington has been infuriated by WikiLeaks and is believed to be considering how to indict Assange over the huge leak.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said any cyber clampdown may prove to be WikiLeaks's legacy.

He noted that Napster was eventually shut down by the courts although it lives on in myriad reincarnations such as The Pirate Bay.

"Ten years from now no one's going to look back and say WikiLeaks was a good thing," Lewis told AFP. "They may have started out with good intentions but it's going to backfire.

"I think the thing that's going to happen is people are going to step back and ask 'Is this responsible politics?' 'Is this what we want?' And I think the answer is going to be no," he said.

"The WikiLeaks people have been about as irresponsible as you can get and they're going to provoke a response and the response will be to try to constrain this kind of activity in the future," Lewis said.

"No government and no company is happy with the idea that somebody can steal their data and these guys can just publish it," he said.

Media analyst Jeff Jarvis, in a recent op-ed article for Germany's Welt am Sontag republished on his blog Buzzmachine.com, said WikiLeaks and the Internet have combined to "puncture" the power of government secrecy.

"Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe," Jarvis said. "Let us use this episode to examine as citizens just how secret and how transparent our governments should be," he said.

"For today, in the Internet age, power shifts from those who hold secrets to those who create openness. That is our emerging reality."