WikiLeaks tastes its own medicine

Talk about chutzpah.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now has the nerve to hint at legal action against a British newspaper for -- get a load of this -- disclosing a key password allowing access to all 251,287 diplomatic cables originally stolen from the U.S. government.

Think of it. Assange wants to call in the law because someone wrongly granted the whole world access to his documents.

Assange's sad plight -- somebody get us a Kleenex -- illustrates the dangers of hacker ideology, which asserts that all information ought to be free and laws protecting it are made to be broken. Recently RankMyHack.com, which awards points to users who prove they've hacked into various websites, was itself reportedly hacked.

There's rough justice in all this, of course. Revolutions often eat their children, and anarchy is unhealthy for practically everybody. But any satisfaction to be had in Assange's latest comeuppance must be fleeting; the released cables are studded with the unredacted names of those who spoke freely to U.S. diplomats, often in repressive nations that could exact bloody revenge. And the whole business underscores the widespread inadequacy of data security both in and out of government.

Governments keep too many secrets, but some secrets are worth keeping. Those who worship the power of unfettered disclosure inevitably learn that it's a sword with two very sharp edges.