When branching from a private branch via 
"fossil branch new newBranchName current"
the resultant branch is now visible.

When doing the above this also pops up:
"gpg: no default secret key: secret key not available
gpg: out-770939853ADDB6FA703B: clearsign failed: secret key not available
unable to sign manifest.  continue (y/N)? y"

I've never touched the clearsign setting and as far as I know it defaults to off
but just to make sure I turn it off locally and then globally and the clearsign prompt still pops up.

Now when you do a branch from a private branch via:
"fossil commit --branch stillPrivate -m 'some message'".
privateness is preserved.

Furthermore,  Dr. Hipp in an email response regarding converting private branches to public that you could do "DELETE FROM private" and then a fossil rebuild and all your private branches will be public.  I updated to versions of trunk from when he wrote the reply(Tue, 22 Feb 2011 03:37:18 -08) and this is indeed the case all private branches are then public.  Version 04ddad7ab8 doesn't display the same behaviour.  After the rebuild,  the private table is again populated with artifacts representing the manifests from the private branches.  Wondering if this unadvertised "dirty trick" just doesn't work anymore of if the rebuild process is doing something it shouldn't