But practically, what would you do given the information divulged. Hackers gonna hack, that's known. Does knowing Russian agents attempted a hack cast them in w

But practically, what would you do given the information divulged. Hackers gonna hack, that's known. Does knowing Russian agents attempted a hack cast them in worse light? No; we already know Russia isn't a close political ally of the US. What details of the hack do is tip off the Russians to burn their channels and methods and complicate the NSA's work in protecting American digital assets from further attack (as well as, depending on what secondary information can be gleaned from the hack based on what the Russians know, compromise the NSA's own back-channels and espionage approaches to understanding what Russia's spy operations are doing). There's a difference between the leaks Deep Throat provided ("Your President is a criminal") and the leaks allegedly executed by Reality Winner ("Russian spies are spying, as Russian spies do"). A failure to distinguish qualitative nature of dumped information weakens both the future security of leakers and the overall philosophy that more transparency is a good thing.