WikiLeaks emerges with a great deal of credibility from all this, and other journalistic organizations now will be eager to work with them — whoever they are. Though the Times appears to have dealt with them with great care, there’s no guarantee others will. Frankly, the whole bunch gives me the wiki creeps. If ever there was an organization tailor-made to launder disinformation for some intelligence agency’s black ops, this is it…

It once was said that Napoleon’s soldiers were so ambitious that every private carried a marshal’s baton in his rucksack. In this new era, every private may carry a hacker’s laptop in his duffel bag. How a 22-year-old private first class had such unsupervised access to such an array of classified material is an interesting question, though the answer may not be the obvious one. Ever since the searing indictment of the U.S. intelligence failures that preceded 9/11, two administrations have attempted to create structures and procedures that would integrate information-gathering and make its product as quickly and widely available as possible. That’s a good thing, but it also may make classified material more vulnerable.

If the administration’s reaction to this leak leads to a re-compartmentalizing of intelligence with dramatically less sharing between agencies, the Times’ publication of the Afghan reports will have had the unintended consequence of undermining both governmental openness and national security.