The great Internet secret is that truly big secrets are dead.

Imagine the power and cunning secreted within those who decided to commit sex acts on Iraqi prisoners — to say nothing of a formidable Department of Defense blinding our eyes to the coffins of our own war dead. And yet, almost immediately we could see the images ourselves on the Web. They’re uploaded on sites like “The Memory Hole” and “robert-fisk.com,” and by “embedded” reporters (official and unofficial), by families with members suffering abroad, and by cranky writers who can’t find a friendly editor.

This same revolution is hidden within the attempt to distort or conceal the past of any politician running for office. John Kerry’s war records are now publicly visible, down to the signature on his enlistment form. Or the precise figures of civilian casualties in Iraq, rarely mentioned in the press.

Nevertheless we remain stubbornly blind – all of us, not only the habit-chained media – to the radical nature of the Net. We still haven’t figured out how personal, detailed and accessible it has become to everyone, not just high-brow nerds.

We’re facing not just a two-way information flow, not just an “information highway” and an instant fund-raiser, but a hydra-headed digital angel – or monster. This spring we began to hear that the Internet is at last competing with TV and the press. But the Web isn’t simply one more “medium,” one more extension of CBS or USA Today. Our Net is an activist tool, as different from flashy TV news and political ads as vintage wine is from Coca-Cola.

Simple messages – Kerry is a bogus hero, torture at Abu Ghraib is the invention of just five deluded soldiers – won’t work. Why? Five minutes on Google or Yahoo offers us hundreds of angles and original documents on any single story. The other night, for example, I looked up the press’ favorite scapegoat for Abu Ghraib, Pfc. Lynndie England, a petite young woman who dragged nude prisoners around on the end of a leash – and found some 4,000 fact-opinion entries, including her own testimony that she had been ordered to wield that leash and drag one poor victim around for “five to six hours.”

The Web turns slick headlines into unbelievable complexity – that is, reality. We now know everything about Kerry’s stop-go-fight-stop attitude toward Vietnam: how he saved lives, took shrapnel in his leg, turned against the war later, with millions of others, when he saw the true clumsiness of our strategy.

The ability to sniff out the “mass mind” potential in any story is no longer the beginning and end of journalism. If the media treat the readers/viewers like children, they’ll lose credibility fast. That’s why they have to wake up to the meaning of the ubiquitous search engine. Surely it will impact the raw, writhing election campaign facing us and stimulate a large, impassioned turnout. And the researcher-citizen who knows how to find it all is the key in the lock. We don’t need a Michael Moore, whose film tells about the ties between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family, or even a Douglas Brinkley, whose packed biography of Kerry tells us little-known stories about the candidate’s facile, multi-lingual father.

Little Brother, in brief, is swamping Big Media Brother. He could be the signal rebuff to our traditional view of political campaigns – that most American voters remain disinterested until the last month, jarred only by the TV debates, acting out of emotion and prejudice rather than sophisticated political calculus. For years this nonsense has been quietly contradicted by serious studies of “exit polls.” Even pre-Internet, the Americans who actually turned out to vote were and are informed, impassioned and rather contemptuous of electronic news.

When we heard the Defense Department had “forbidden” images of dead soldiers, we flocked to see them on the Web. When we heard that hostage Kim Sun Il had been killed in Iraq, we opened Al-Jazeera’s home page.

We may use the Web each day for countless practical reasons, but at night it’s ready – we’re ready – to sample chats, distant lands and languages – even specialized lodes of information such as the legal memos given to our White House more than a year ago, justifying “stress” torture. The point is that the Web reader-viewer-investigator can choose to be committed, to go after his own passions, not just accept passively what others offer. If this means voting in 2004 is going to be more difficult to predict, more rambunctious, more committed by a group of decentralized, self-driven men and women, let it be.

If this further means our minds are changing, in the most unexpected manner, let that be, too. If we knew what’s coming, as Stephen Hawking, our quantum Einstein, lately said, we’d miss the thrill of the surprises constantly forced upon us by a risk-rich God.