This weekend, I went on a Twitter rant in which I took the extreme position that Wikileaks had done no good whatsoever, then challenged defenders to prove me wrong. It took a while to get even one concrete example of a change directly attributable to the leaking — namely, the video of U.S. abuses in Iraq that forced the Iraqi government to deny the U.S.’s request of legal immunity for residual troops.
That was a good thing, in my opinion, but it’s small compared to the original vision of Wikileaks. As implied in the name, it was meant to be a distributed network of leakers — rather than the bizarre personality cult it ultimately became. The goal was to restrict the ability of the elites to operate in secrecy by making the cost of secrecy astronomically greater and thus to limit their ability to abuse their power.
There was simply no way this plan was ever going to work.
I have been saying from the start that Wikileaks was achieving and was going to achieve nothing. And if you look at the whole thing rationally, you will see that I was right and there isn’t a single useful or important thing to have come out of it. I know everybody wants to have hope and believe the best, but this plan was doomed from the start.
However, let’s not make the mistake of confusing Assange and Snowden. There is still hope – slim as it is – that Snowden’s revelations will result in change. And the outcome does not depend on what Snowden does from now on, or at least not a whole lot. He has done his part, and this is not the kind of an issue where a Spiderman-like savior will deliver us from all evil while we sit back and enjoy the process. Now everything hangs on how the American people will process the intense violations of their civil freedoms and react to them.
And this, in turn, depends on the economy. We all know that I’m not a Marxist and do not look to the economy as an answer to every question. Here, however, it is more than appropriate to look at where the country is economically. If the general public feels that the recession has been sufficiently mitigated and the financial future is not completely bleak, we can expect people to start paying attention to their civil rights. If the fear brought on by the recession is still very strong, we can expect everybody to forget about Snowden and his revelations very fast and very easily.
Clarissa's Blog 
One thing that Wikileaks has definitely not accomplished is effective protection for whistleblowers. I’m not sure if that is even possible. Ostensibly, the more sensitive the data, the shorter the list of people cleared to access it; making the whistleblower a needle in a very small haystack.
Something I just read gave me some cause for hope. While there is little we can do to stop the transfer to business and government of the kind of metadata generated by our mobile and other networked devices, it should be possible to send a copy of that data stream (or a subset of it scrubbed of intimately identifying data) into the public domain:
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