Nothing makes a bit of information more titillating than knowing that you were never supposed to see it. This, as much as any actual revelation so far, is the power of the ongoing document dump from the Hillary Clinton campaign, which WikiLeaks is in the middle of doling out.

The files, said to be illegally taken from the email of Mrs. Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, are available to all. Which means anyone can determine, on the fly, their own personal standards for journalism — newsworthiness, context and documentation, ethics.

Weaponized data dumps like these present a challenge even for full-time journalists, who are assessing hundreds and thousands of documents every day in real time, under both competitive pressure and the intense press-watcher scrutiny of an election.

Throw in an internet hive of document-scourers, some of them interested parties, and you have a recipe for indiscriminate sharing, invasion of privacy and disinformation, at too great a speed and in too great a volume to be vetted.