As you read through the documents, you do begin to pick up the code (FOB is a forward operating base, BDA is a battle damage assessment), but after a while, even the summaries don’t make that much sense. Was that Predator operation crucial? Was that Afghan police battle ordinary friendly fire, or did it reflect a larger conflict? Here the New York Times and the Guardian can help a little bit: They have had time to review the documents, run them quickly by experts, and do a bit of comparing and contrasting. Assange, despite his insistence on the value of raw data, knew perfectly well that the public wouldn’t be able to make much of this stuff and gave the documents to the papers in advance.

Still, even these newspapers are operating under a major handicap. Because WikiLeaks gave them a deadline, they had no chance to do any real newspaper reporting. Had there been journalists on the ground when those Afghan police were shooting at one another, or even a year later, they might have discovered something interesting—that this was really a story about clan warfare, perhaps, or about poor training—or nothing at all. When a report like that one is placed onto a long list, together with other equally enigmatic, equally out-of-context documents, it’s difficult to know.