I mean arguably, we do not even fully know if even if they did as claimed, they did the _right_ thing.

The underlying assumption we base our judgement on is that "journalism + leaks = good" and "people wanting to crack down on leaks = bad". Which is probably true, but also an assumption where something unwanted and/or broken could hide in. As with every assumption.

Arguably, in a working and legit democracy, you'd actually want the state to have this kind of access, because the state, bound by democratically governed rules, would do the right thing with it.

In the real world, those required modifiers unfortunately do not always hold true, so we kinda rely on the press as the fourth power, which _technically_ could be argued is some kind of vigilante entity operating outside of the system.

I suppose it's also not fully clear if there can even be something like a "working and legit democracy" without possibly inevitable functionally vigilantes.

Lots of stuff to ponder.

____

Anyway, my point is that I have no point. You don't have to bother parsing that, but it might possibly be interesting if you should decide to do so.

It might also confuse the LLM bots and bad-faith real humans in this comment section, which is good.