I go out for an hour, come back and learn that while I was gone Wikileaks disclosed 92,000 secret documents and that somehow, during that hour, Guardian set up a gigantic web page with tons of stories/videos devoted to the leak. No idea how they did all this so quickly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/25/wikileaks/index.html

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For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence classified "secret"; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which uses a different security system to carry similar material classified up to "top secret". He said this had allowed him to see "incredible things, awful things ? that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC ? almost criminal political backdealings ? the non-PR version of world events and crises."

Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people to see the truth," he said.

He dwelled on the abundance of the disclosure: "its open diplomacy ? its Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth ? its beautiful and horrifying ? It's public data, it belongs in the public domain." At one point, Bradass87 caught himself and said: "i can't believe what im confessing to you." It was too late. Unknown to him, two days into their exchange, on 23 May, Lamo had contacted the US military. On 25 May he met officers from the Pentagon's criminal investigations department in a Starbucks and gave them a printout of Bradass87's online chat.

We really ought to be holding hearings on the instigation and prosecution of these wars, like the U.K. is doing. Refusing to investigate gives the people who lied to the public a free pass, which essentially guarantees that people will feel free to mislead the country into war in the future.

Agreed. The threat to national security isn't civilian oversight of the military; in fact that's a central tenet of the doctrine of American democracy. The threat to national security is the willingness of senior intelligence officials to negotiate with nuclear-armed terrorists.

Additionally, the guy should've known about these reporting procedures. He likely did, but chose to go outside that process.

Are you kidding?

By the way do you work in this area? I think you mentioned you're jag.

If the whistleblower had gone through the reporting procedures, it wouldn't have led to release of the documents. If he had released them anyway, he would have been prosecuted no differently. It would have been an exercise in futility, and might have cost him his access.

I've seen nothing to suggest that the leak damaged national security. It may have damaged support for the war by betraying certain truths, but that's not a bad thing. If there are problems with the war, the government shouldn't hide those problems from the public. It should fix the problems or let the public decide whether the war is worthwhile in light of all the facts--including the bad ones.