Re: and it was
Aye. This is the sort of white male entitlement we saw with John McAfee and Michael Avenatti, to name just two from recent news: do something admirable _once_, and then expect a free pass from thereon out.
When looking at public disclosures of otherwise confidential information, there seems to me to be two ways to do it: first is like with the Panama Papers or the Snowden releases, where a small group of journalists acted to protect those irrelevantly swept up in the documents and then releases the core. The other is Wikileaks, which just dumps everything out with no thought to the people whose lives they might be endangering for no good reason (e.g. the names of people who worked with the US in Iraq).
But that's also the difference between journalism and, I don't know, being a source. There is stuff that really shouldn't be public (from the mundane, like individual's medical records, to the dramatic, like the identity of intelligence agents embedded in our adversary's hierarchy). A responsible human should make a decision as to whether disclosure is in the (legitimate, if not legal) public interest... and if you don't trust _a_ journalist, do what Snowden did: release to several different ones that can disagree with each other.
But "responsible" is not Assange. Entitled twat, sure. But that's not the same thing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
