Imagine that you just got a new job. As part of your employment agreement, you agree to not disclose secrets and/or proprietary information that you learn as part of your job.
Later on, you come across something that you think is just so darn interesting that others not privy to that knowledge really ought to know it. You call up your friendly local journalist and give him that tidbit, and he rushes it into print.
Plamegate? Not quite. I'm talking about Apple Computer, who lost a court case on just this issue last week. But the important thing to keep in mind is that it's the exact same case: someone promised to keep something secret, and then broke the law in giving that information to someone to disseminate it. In neither case was there a public interest in that knowledge becoming public, and good reason for the secret to remain secret.
Over here, Kos said:
Each one of these victories (like the Apple case recently resolved in our favor last week in California) builds a body of law for future judges to draw on.
The Apple case may have been resolved in Kos's favor, but it wasn't resolved in ours. This is a greenlight for the Bush administration and its lackeys to start using California "journalists" to leak anything and everything they want out there.
Note that I'm not talking about whistleblowers, or releasing information that is in the public interest -- that's a different story altogether. The Apple info wasn't, and Valerie Plame's job status wasn't. This is about secretly and illegally releasing privileged information and being able to walk away scott-free.
Military records? IRS records? VA records? It's all fair game, according to this one ruling. The "journalist" cannot be required to disclose the name of the lawbreaker(s) who leaked the damaging information, no matter what reason they had for leaking it. And "journalist" includes anyone with access to any Web space.
Whoever the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate is, they should expect that anything and everything negative that any government office knows about them will become public. And why not, when gov't officials have now been told that they cannot be held accountable?