The reporter in me is fascinated by the ongoing story of Wiki-leaks, and its decision to post online 76,000 classified or otherwise secret documents about the U.S. war in Afghanistan—mostly because I no idea that our messy situation in Afghanistan was, you know, news. Nevertheless, Wiki-leaks made a gigantic splash by sharing those documents with the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, which on July 25 jointly broke the supposed story that our military mission in Afghanistan has been going poorly pretty much since U.S. troops arrived there in 2001.

I won’t comment on the ethics of leaking such information. We in the compliance community can be plenty alarmed just by talking about the mechanics of leaking it.

More than anything else, the Afghanistan Document Dump underscores just how quickly and easily people can now move huge volumes of information. Consider this: 91,000 pages is equivalent to more than 342 copies of The Big Short by Michael Lewis, or a pile of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest stacked more than 26 feet high. That’s a lot of information by anyone’s measure. And Wiki-leaks shared it with the media in less than a day.

Now compare that to Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent turned spy for the Soviet Union and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time of his arrest in 2001, most people described his espionage as one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history. He leaked only several hundred documents—that is, less than one Stieg Larsson novel—over the course of 22 years.

Welcome to the information insecurity age, folks. Anyone can now steal huge volumes of information, perhaps even all your company’s information, with a portable hard drive available at an office supply store for less than $100. That thief can walk out the door with that flash-drive in his pocket, get a drink at the local coffee shop, and then share all that information with anyone in the world almost instantly.

And just to feed your paranoia a bit more: The person believed to have provided the documents to Wiki-leaks is Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old from Oklahoma who joined the U.S. Army in 2007. He had been working as an intelligence analyst, and has the rank of private first class.

As always, your biggest security risks are your employees.

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