Scott Shane had an interesting piece over the weekend in the New York Times on a topic I wrote about last year : What should journalists do when they receive “authentic and newsworthy” information from a foreign intelligence service? The question has become salient again because of Amy Chozick’s worry that she was an “unwitting agent of Russian intelligence” due to her reporting about the Russia-hacked DNC emails in 2016. (Shane himself wrote in late 2016 that the Times had become “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”)

Shane suggests that the problem with the DNC leak stories was not their content, which “revealed true and important things, including the party leadership’s hostility to Bernie Sanders’s campaign and the texts of Mrs. Clinton’s private speeches, which she had refused to release.” The problem, rather, was that “Russian hackers chose not to deliver to American voters the same inside material from the Trump campaign,” and thus “the tilt of the coverage was decided in Moscow.” By counting on reporters to “follow their usual rules” of reporting truthful information in the public interest, Shane concludes, “the Kremlin hacked American journalism.”

Shane’s piece doesn’t propose any fixes for this problem other than “extreme caution and extra transparency.” It is hard to know how much more transparent the Times could have been beyond its practice of disclosing in its stories, when it knew, that WikiLeaks and Russia were the sources for the stolen information it reported and analyzed.

Moreover, the conundrum Shane identifies is much more of a problem for journalists than he lets on. For starters, there is nothing unusual about a leaker tilting the coverage of a story. That is a common practice. Journalists often publish information that someone extracted without authorization, often illegally, from the government or another organization. The person who removes this information might be an insider or might be an outsider who steals the information by digital theft. In either case, the leaker is not typically even-handed in what he or she leaks. The leaker leaks the information and wants it reported for a reason.

The person who leaked Donald Trump’s tax returns to the Times a month before the election, for example, almost certainly wanted to harm Trump and help Hillary Clinton. That person decided the tilt of the Times coverage. Edward Snowden wanted to expose what he thought was National Security Agency wrongdoing . By stealing and then leaking the documents he did, and by not leaking information about, say, the NSA’s many internal accountability mechanisms or its many intelligence successes, Snowden decided the tilt of the Times coverage. I doubt Shane is suggesting that there was anything wrong with these stories even though the leaker clearly tilted coverage in a certain way by controlling the information that journalists received.

“We’re to some extent captive of the bravery or lack of bravery of people in government” who leak information, former New York Times Executive editor Bill Keller once told me . Journalists are also captive to the leaker’s agenda. According to the many elite journalists I interviewed for my book Power and Constraint, journalists worry about the motive and agenda of the source, but only insofar as that agenda affects the truth or newsworthiness of the leaked material. Motives don’t matter otherwise because reporters aren’t supposed to choose sides in what they report. It did not matter to the Times whether Edward Snowden was motivated by fame or by a desire to shut down the NSA or by a desire to harm U.S. intelligence. It did not matter to the Times whether the Trump tax return leaker—whose identity the Times apparently never confirmed —wanted to harm Trump. All that mattered was whether the stories were “authentic and newsworthy.”

Shane asks whether the rules should be different when the source of the information is a foreign intelligence service. David Pozen of Columbia Law School seems to think not. Publishing leaks provided by foreign spies “legitimizes and incentivizes hacking,” he told Shane. “I think this makes the ethical calculus for journalists much more complex,” he adds.

But that argument proves way too much. Journalists publish stolen information all the time without worrying about the legality of the source’s method for obtaining the information. They published and analyzed the Snowden documents, the Manning material, the hacked Sony emails, the Panama Papers, and the leaked NSA and CIA offensive cyber tools, to take just a few examples. In all of these examples, and thousands more, publication and analysis of stolen material may incentivize, and legitimize, the theft.

And yet such material is the lifeblood of reporting, especially national security reporting. If publication of the DNC materials raises ethical issues, so too does the broader commonplace practice of publishing stolen information.

Another problem with having different rules for information stolen by foreign intelligence services is that very often journalists will not know the identity of the source. As Shane notes, the Times and other journalistic outlets “have added to their web pages a ‘ secure drop ’ that can offer leakers total anonymity.” He says that secure drop “may be a crucial attraction for a whistle-blower deep inside an American institution, but it will also protect a hacker sitting in Moscow or Beijing” who can feed information to the Times without the Times knowing the source.

What would the Times do in a situation where it had important truthful information but did not know the source? We know the answer to this question from the Trump tax return story: It would do everything in its power to verify and corroborate the truth of the information, and then publish. The identity and motive of the source did not matter because the Times did not have that information.

Even when journalists know the source, it is hard to see how the source’s motives can be the touchstone.

Imagine that the source of the stolen and leaked DNC email information was not the Russian government but a disgruntled DNC employee who had reluctantly concluded that Trump was preferable to Clinton because she was so corrupt. Few would doubt that the Times should publish the information which, as Shane noted, was truthful and revealingly newsworthy about Clinton’s behavior. Why should the criterion of publication be different because the stolen but truthful information came from the Russians? Both the imagined DNC worker and the Russians wanted to harm Clinton and help Trump. The publication in either instance would have had a similar political impact. (If anything, the impact on the public would have been greater if stolen and leaked by the DNC employee rather than the Russians, since more people would have discounted information stolen by Russia.)

Intuitions differ on these questions, I realize. But if you think information stolen by Russia should be out of bounds and not published, should that ban apply to information stolen by all intelligence agencies? Or only to information stolen by adversarial intelligence services? What about information that comes from sources known to have connections to foreign intelligence services? Or information that comes from citizens from adversary nations? What about information published by WikiLeaks? It is very hard to know where journalists should draw the line beyond the usual one of insisting that the information be truthful and newsworthy, and of disclosing the source of the information.

Whatever the right answer should be, I have little doubt that the Times and other elite news outlets will continue to report truthful and newsworthy information leaked by foreign intelligence services. Indeed, in three ways the Times has organized itself in the last decade to invite such information from foreign intelligence services.

First, the Times has lowered the bar on the publication of classified information in recent years. One reason it has done so, as Assistant General Counsel, David McCraw, acknowledged (47:30 ff.), is that the WikiLeaks and Snowden experiences convinced the Times legal team “that there is no legal consequence from publishing leaks” of classified information, at least where lives are not clearly at stake.

Second, the Times has developed a much more spacious understanding of what types of information, especially classified information, serve the public interest. In particular, as Shane and two colleagues acknowledged in 2016, the Times and other elite outlets have developed an “appetite for the hacked material,” and not just from foreign intelligence services.

And third, as noted above, the Times practically invites foreign intelligence services to give it stolen information through its secure drop. The Times boasts that secure drop does “not ask for or require any identifiable information” or “track or log information surrounding our communication.” It also says that information sent via secure drop is stored in encrypted format on its servers and is decrypted and read on a computer unconnected to the Internet.

In all three of these respects, the Times has—under pressure from outlets such as WikiLeaks—become very much like WikiLeaks. Yes, the Times curates and edits and analyzes better than WikiLeaks, and is more selective in what it publishes. But it publishes secret stolen information that it never would have published in the past, and it has set up fancy encrypted mechanisms to solicit such stolen information anonymously. The WikiLeaks-ization of the American media is the real lesson of Shane’s story, and of journalism in the hacking era.

