Is Julian Assange, the Australian former computer hacker running the website WikiLeaks, a journalist or a criminal? The debate is running hot in the US. Who is Assange to set himself up as the judge of what should be kept secret and what should be exposed, the Pentagon chiefs are asking.
''By the standards of US law - including under the Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case - he should be considered a criminal,'' wrote the conservative columnist Marc Thiessen on the Washington Post website PostPartisan. ''He is in unlawful possession of classified information. He has released tens of thousands of documents, which the Taliban are using at this moment to target and execute Afghans who co-operated with US and NATO forces. And he is threatening to release many thousands more, which could put more American, Afghan and allied lives at risk. His actions are a clear violation of US law. He should face justice for these crimes.''
Over at Time magazine, another commentator went for the journalism description. Michael Scherer wrote that Assange was doing exactly what ''respectable and responsible reporters working for top-flight news organisations" try to do. He is a Seymour Hersh of the digital age, in other words.
But the three news organisations that Assange allowed to look through his initial trove of 76,000 US Army documents on Afghanistan and other subjects - The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel - are rushing to disavow his description of them as ''partners'' of WikiLeaks. To them, they insist, WikiLeaks is just a source.
The issue is getting tense. The Obama administration is weighing up whether it can prosecute Assange under espionage laws - one problem being he is not spying for anyone but the US and other publics, though he is certainly in possession of secrets. The Pentagon is meanwhile pleading with Assange to return the 15,000 other secret papers he is withholding.
Upping the ante, WikiLeaks has uploaded a massive (1.4 gigabyte) file titled ''Insurance'' encrypted with a cipher so complex that it is virtually unbreakable unless Assange has left some weakness in its mathematics or accidentally divulges a password.
The file is even bigger than the 76,000 documents released last month. The speculation is that it contains the 260,000 diplomatic documents from the State Department - containing details of ''almost criminal black dealings'' - mentioned by the US Army private Bradley Manning, 22, now under arrest on suspicion of leaking the horrifying video of a US Army helicopter shooting up what turned out to be a group of journalists and other civilians in Baghdad.
The irony widely noticed about this torrent of opened-up secrets is that so far it tells us what we already know, at least in the bigger picture, about the war in Afghanistan, and is unlikely to be a game-changer except perhaps in adding to public disillusionment about the prospects of success. This isn't anything like the 1948 disclosure by Moscow's spies of the successful US-British decryption of KGB messages, which resulted in the intelligence window being closed.
The most irresponsible aspect of the WikiLeaks exercise would be the failure to black out the identities of Afghans working with the Western forces. Assange admits he has not been through all the documents in detail. There appear to be several scores of names and villages mentioned. To the extent that this collaboration is not already known locally, the leaks put the identified Afghans at risk of assassination.
Yet it won't be WikiLeaks that loses this war for the US. Let's look at another disclosure which came out about the same time: the three-part report in The Washington Post about ''Top Secret America''. Compiled from open sources, it revealed an archipelago of highly secret buildings across the country, focused on Washington, where an intelligence industry employs no fewer than 854,000 people with ''top secret'' security clearances, almost four times the number of troops deployed on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq in the supposed war on terrorism.
Some 1271 government organisations and 1931 companies are involved in work at top secret level. There has been such a ''gusher'' of funding (the word of the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates) since the September 11, 2001, attacks that anyone with a top secret clearance is wooed with bonuses, enormous salaries and company BMWs by firms anxious to cash in. The core intelligence agencies are getting left with younger, inexperienced analysts with sketchy knowledge of the cultures and languages of target countries.
If Assange cannot look through his 92,000 leaked documents, the ''super users'' at the top of the analytical pyramid have no hope of digesting even the 50,000 intelligence reports published for internal government use each year. Many go unread.
Every day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other data transmissions, before using keyword or voice recognition software to filter out suspicious messages. Clues are buried in such a volume of material that often it has only been after a terrorism event that they are found. Military commanders have complained they get little intelligence of operational use out of this industry, the Post reported.
It is not surprising that many outsiders regard this secret industry with suspicion. It consumes huge sums - $US75 billion ($82 billion) at the official count, which the Post said did not include all private-sector activity - and invades a lot of privacy, for indifferent results, making it fair game for WikiLeaks.
It would not be surprising if some of the brilliant and creative recruited into ''Top Secret America'' also get disillusioned with their work and what they see, and get tempted to disclose mistakes, waste or wrongdoing.
Leaking is as easy as loading files on to a CD and slipping it into a Lady Gaga cover, as Manning apparently did.
There is a clash of cultures here, and anyone who knows young people will know who will ultimately win.
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