practical problems of the Wikileaks model

An organization dedicated to exposing other people's secrets must itself be secretive, for at least three reasons:

1) To protect secrecy of the people who provide the organization with secrets. Otherwise people will be reluctant to provide them with leaks.

2) To protect themselves from retribution from aggrieved parties.

3) To protect the methods by which secret information is collected. Otherwise adversary organizations can anticipate and prepare against those methods.

Not only must such an organization be secretive, but it must also be more secretive than the organizations it goes after.

4) The tools it uses to gather secrets could be used to expose its own secrets.

5) To prevent this, it must have even more powerful tools to protect its secrets than it uses to expose the secrets of others.

6) The organization dedicated to exposing secrets must also become dedicated to developing powerful tools to protect secrets, so that it can preserve its own secrets, and continue operating.

It is unlikely they will preserve a monopoly on these powerful tools for protecting secrets. They would soon become generally available, so:

7) To operate, the organization must develop the tools that will make it impossible for it to operate.

Things I have learned

It's hard to predict the future. On the other hand, what else are you going to predict?

those who are ignorant of the future are condemned to precede it

Sometimes history repeats itself, sometimes the future precedes itself, and sometimes stuff just happens.

We focus our awareness on the few things we know explicitly. This solid, explicit knowledge is surrounded by a miasma of semi-awareness, things we vaguely know we don't know well. Beyond the miasma of semi-awareness is an infinite plasma of obliviousness, and it is there that most of the world happens.