Wikileaks and others have released a mountain of "secret" information onto the internet, yet the sky has not fallen in, world war three has not begun... Journalists have spent hours over these materials looking for juicy stories and there are very few. So should somebody not be asking why was all this information "secret" in the first place?
Surely the basic principle behind the law should be whether any actual harm was done. If somebody leaks information that does no harm it should surely be a crime to punish such a person, not a crime for them to have leaked the data. Are we not in danger of arriving at a situation in which breaking the law has become breaking the regulations? It is similar to the situation where one goes to a shop to complain about something and is told by the employee that he can do nothing because of the shop's procedures - but if the customer has lost out or been harmed in some way then it is the procedures that are wrong and the shop is still at fault. Countries, however, are judge and jury in their own court so it is too easy for them to make arbitrary rules (including rules about keeping heaps of trivial information secret) for the sake of administrative convenience when no issues of real harm are involved.
Clearly there are some things that it is legitimate for a government to keep secret, but it seems this has gone too far.
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