The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets, it is to protect officials

I haven't managed to wade through any significant fraction of the latest Wikileaks dump, but my initial impression (and it seems others as well) is, "duh". the headline disclosures—that the US spies on its allies (including trying to gather personally identifying information on foreign officials), that its foreign service officers think various world leaders are morons or jerks (and that in some cases they actually are jerks in ways we didn't already know), and that it generally throws its weight around—aren't surprising in general, even if they are in a few cases surprising in detail (frequent flyer numbers? really?). What they are, of course, is embarassing, because these are things that everyone knows even if they don't generally get admitted to publicly. I don't know if this leak will cause Hillary Clinton to resign, as Jack Shafer argues, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see some people get fired. It's not like that's going to change the macro-level behavior though. You just need some turnover so that we can all pretend that there were a few bad apples and that of course the US won't be doing that bad stuff in the future.