On the very day that Roger Stone was charged with lying about a momentous set of leaks that originated with Russian hackers, a feisty band of transparency activists led by a Boston woman posted a voluminous collection of leaks from inside Russia.

It was less a coincidence than a trend, a consequence of technology and a defining feature of our time. We live in an age of leaks, for better or worse.

The better part is easy: We get access to information powerful people and institutions want to keep secret. The worse part is more complicated, and requires more thoughtful consideration than it gets: Leaks often violate laws against hacking or theft and invade people’s privacy, not always with any higher purpose. They can be powerful, unpredictable, unfair weapons. They can allow one country to meddle, from a safe distance, in the affairs of another.

To wit: The Democratic Party emails and documents, hacked by Russian intelligence and broadcast by WikiLeaks with the veteran political trickster Mr. Stone as cheerleader, may have allowed a foreign power to help elect an American president in 2016. Yet the new, sprawling archive of Russian leaks, ranging from government ties to the Russian Orthodox Church to the Kremlin’s management of its invasion of Ukraine, showed that the Russian state is a target of leaks these days as often as it is a leaker.