@freakazoid @aussierockman

Snowden's motivations don't really matter. He himself said early on that he could be the worst person imaginable, but that's beside the point which was the content of the disclosures and the huge gap in public understanding of how governments use bulk surveillance against their own populations.

It's easy to do lazy character assassinations on Wikileaks people. Assange himself seems like a dubious sort of character. But Wikileaks at its height around about 2010 did contribute something to public understanding which didn't exist previously. They also probably saved Snowden's life.

If there are lessons from Wikileaks it's that:
* The wiki idea didn't work. It's hard to wikify investigative journalism, which it turns out is an actual job and not easy to do on a voluntary basis.
* Transparency of institutions is good but on its own is not enough
* Revealing the dubious characteristics of governments does not necessarily change their behavior. There is not necessarily any democratic leverage from data availability.
* Creating a celebrity figurehead for your organization is a losing strategy which creates more problems than it solves. It would have been better if the figurehead of Wikileaks had been an anonymous-style computer animation of some harmless looking news reader. You can't imprison or character assassinate an animation.