Speaking about Mrs. Clinton’s case, Mr. Obama said, “There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get” from unclassified sources.

But after more than seven years in office, the administration has only recently gotten serious about curbing the reflex to stamp “secret” or “top secret” on the cables that flow each day from embassies to the State Department, or course through the Pentagon.

In a memorandum issued on March 17, the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, asked for a “fundamental classification guidance review” that could allow information that is only sensitive for a brief time to be declassified quickly, rather than waiting the customary 15 or 25 years. He even asked whether the classification category “Confidential,” which no two government agencies seem to define the same way, should be eliminated.

In fact, Mr. Obama’s distinction between genuine secrets and vaguely secret material echoes arguments that The New York Times and other news media organizations made after the WikiLeaks disclosures, some of which were published in The Times. A substantial percentage of the 250,000 cables consisted of articles published in local news media. As officials entered them into the State Department’s system, many were marked “classified,” even though they could be found in simple Google searches.

In a news conference after the disclosure of the State Department cables, Mr. Obama pledged to energetically pursue those who leaked government secrets. “We have mechanisms in place where if we can root out folks who have leaked, they will suffer consequences, ,” Mr. Obama said at the time. “In some cases it’s criminal.”

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, in those days, did not see much distinction among classified documents. She said then that publishing the cables would “tear at the fabric” of alliances, and particularly objected to the publication of “any information that was intended to be confidential, including private discussions between counterparts or our diplomats’ personal assessments and observations.”