> The piece does not say "never leak emails ever", the piece says "only link emails that are of civil interest", which is exactly the position that Snowden has

> The piece does not say "never leak emails ever", the piece says "only link emails that are of civil interest", which is exactly the position that Snowden has been espousing for some time. The problem is that what is of civil interest is subjective. For example the transcripts of Clinton's speeches to wall street wouldn't be of civil interest except that she's running for public office. Hell, a strong case could be made that all communications of any government official or employee at any level is of civil interest. That's sort of the point of FOIA. Too bad that politicians and functionaries have been working hard to expand the boundary of what is protected from FOIA requests. > The suggestion here is that honoring anonymously leaked troves of emails without considering their civil merit is itself a back door around the fourth amendment. At some point the government will anonymously leak something to wikileaks and use it against a citizen. The government already indiscriminately gathers private data, picks through it, brings charges, and then lies about the provenance of the data. They call it parallel construction. It's too late to be worrying about whether the powers that be are going to skirt the constitution, it's a done deal.