I must be one of those intellectually inconsistent folks, so take this for what it's worth. This particular piece of information doesn't bother me so much. As

I must be one of those intellectually inconsistent folks, so take this for what it's worth. This particular piece of information doesn't bother me so much. As somebody else mentioned, it seems to my layman mind that, to a first order, those with sufficient resources and determination to do damage to these targets also have the resources and determination to think hard for a little while about what things might be important to a nation, and figure out where those things are made. This might save them some time, but I'm skeptical that this leak will create an army of only-mildly-interested attackers who otherwise wouldn't have bothered to find any of these places. That said, I disagree that "either you stick up for [the] unmitigated leaks or you don't." Sure it's an opinion, but I think it's OK to think that the world is best off with some information out in the open, and some information private. I agree that governments should default to the former rather than the latter, but everything in moderation. If you stand for this leak, do you also have to stand for the leak of all Visa card numbers and account holder information? Do you have to stand for leaking Google's search history logs, or Tor entry node access logs, or a hospital's medical records? That's not so clear-cut to me. Also, your last sentence leaves out the reality that you will never get rid of the middleman. Today, with Wikileaks, the middlemen who "establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not" are: 1) The set of all disgruntled employees and personnel, and other whistleblowers. Often their motives are pure, but sometimes not. 2) The cabal that runs Wikileaks. They may well have a better sense of what should be public than the average person, but we're still talking about a small set of humans, and we all have our motivations, agendas, needs, and wants to some extent. You can certainly argue that this is a better situation than 15 layers of government bureaucrats, or a few layers of journalists, but again, I don't think it's unilaterally better in all circumstances. P.S.: There is a heaping helping of intellectual inconsistency flying around concerning Wikileaks; I just think that there is room for reasonable concern in there too.