Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.

A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don't understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.

My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I'm not sure that we have grappled with any of them.

In short, Google prefers a world where we consistently go to three restaurants to a world where our choices are impossible to predict.