President Trump, of course, has used the latter frame. As he tweeted on Tuesday morning:

I have been asking Director Comey & others, from the beginning of my administration, to find the LEAKERS in the intelligence community..... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2017

The president’s frustration with “leakers” has been a theme not just in the aftermath of the Post report, but throughout his presidency. It is an anger shared by many, in government and in the military, who have argued that governing itself requires some level of secrecy to operate effectively. But it is also an argument has been turned against the president himself in the day following the Post revelation. “Leaks,” in this story, have been weaponized, by both sides—and in ways that are entirely oppositional to each other. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, captured it well when he remarked, of the leaks about the leaks: “I think it was President Trump who not that long ago tweeted, ‘We need to track down every leaker.’ Now we find out that the leaker is the commander-in-chief.”

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“Leak” wasn’t always so bleak. The word itself—it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *leg (“to dribble, trickle”)—has spent most of its life, in the informational sense of the revealed secret, being notably neutral. It was Noah Webster who seems to have been the first to codify that secretive strain of “leak,” as a verb, in 1832, in the second volume of his Dictionary of the English Language: He defined it then as “to leak out, to find vent; to escape privately from confinement or secresy; as a fact or report.” It was a new term that was describing an ancient practice. Freeing information from its confining “secresy” has been a legally codified (and occasionally remunerative) activity, according to one history, since the year 695, when King Wihtred of Kent enshrined a law declaring, “If a freeman works during [the Sabbath], he shall forfeit his [profits], and the man who informs against him shall have half the fine, and [the profits] of the labor.”

The practice is a longstanding one in America, as well. In 1773, Ben Franklin obtained letters, written by the royally appointed governor of Massachusetts, suggesting that the governor had misled Parliament in order promote a military buildup in the American Colonies. The letters were printed in the Boston Gazette, and caused a firestorm on both sides of the Atlantic. Before they were, though, their contents were teasingly publicized—by Sam Adams, using a mode of communication we might refer to today as “strategic leaking.” How did Franklin get the letters in the first place? From, yes, a leaker—one who remains, still, anonymous.

This form of patriotic tattling may have been common in the Colonies; still, it would take “leaking” more than a century to take on the political connotations that are, today, the default in our discourse. Until the mid-20th century, something simply “leaked out,” without intention or malice or, indeed, subject—as an accident of physics, or perhaps as a broad ratification of Stewart Brand’s adage that “information wants to be free.” In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in 1852, Augustine St. Clare compares his twin brother, Alfred, to their father: “I can see it leaking out in fifty different ways,” Augustine tells his cousin, Ophelia—“just that same strong, overbearing, dominant spirit.” In 1884’s Vivienne: A Novel, “The carefully-guarded secret had leaked out in some way or other.”