The broadest area of consensus is that classification should be less promiscuous and declassification should be easier — for some material, the “secret” designation should expire automatically. To its credit, the Obama administration has with little fanfare initiated a wholesale review of government secret-keeping. Steven Aftergood, an open-government campaigner who has monitored the review, regards the potential as exciting but the progress so far as “embarrassingly modest.”

Image Credit... Gabrielle Plucknette for The New York Times

A second remedy is to better restrict access to the secrets that matter. Since 9/11, the conventional wisdom has moved the opposite way, favoring broader intelligence-sharing as essential to the early detection of terrorist plots. But it is one thing to ensure that law-enforcement agencies share reports of flight-school trainees who have no interest in learning to land their planes. It is another to give an Army private (and 500,000 others) access to a network that contains all the midlevel secrets of the Pentagon and the State Department. According to recent Congressional testimony, the government has been installing software that prevents the downloading of classified information to portable devices and sends an instant alarm when data is being transferred out of a secure system.

As for punishing leakers, my sample of experts agrees, the current law seems to be more than adequate, and the current practice — at least for the rank and file — is anything but permissive. (Indeed, many find the treatment of Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is accused of passing material on to WikiLeaks, offensive. That includes the former State Department spokesman who was forced out for saying so but does not include the president.) Still, few question that the government is entitled to fire or prosecute employees who violate its trust.

“If people sign nondisclosure agreements, they should not disclose,” Aftergood says. “And in extraordinary cases where they feel compelled as a matter of conscience, then ideally they should stand up and say, ‘I have been a witness to an unethical act,’ and accept the consequences.”

Those consequences would most likely be taken more seriously if the people howling against leakers set a better example. Jack Goldsmith, who worked in the George W. Bush Justice Department, argues that nothing undermines respect for secrecy like watching government officials disgorge their notes to Bob Woodward and other inside-story writers.

“People in government won’t take classification decisions seriously when top officials who insist they are important don’t respect them half the time,” Goldsmith says.

Which leaves the tricky issue of us: those whose business includes digging out secrets and publishing them. Schoenfeld, my erstwhile nemesis, says he was never comfortable with the idea that the editors of The Times be imprisoned.