i once asked daniel ellsberg <u+2014> who in 1971 leaked the secret history of the vietnam war known as the pentagon papers <u+2014> if he had any regrets. he told me, as he told many others, that he regretted only that he had not leaked them earlier, when they might have had more impact and perhaps shortened the war. whistle-blowing, as mr. ellsberg did, is a time-honored means for exposing the secret machinations of the powerful. but the release of huge amounts of hacked data, with no apparent oversight or curation, does the opposite. such leaks threaten our ability to dissent by destroying privacy and unleashing a glut of questionable information that functions, somewhat unexpectedly, as its own form of censorship, rather than as a way to illuminate the maneuverings of the powerful. the latest example of these data dumps comes from wikileaks , which is releasing the emails of hillary clinton<u+2019>s campaign chairman, john podesta, in dribs and drabs going back to 2008, when mr. podesta was the co-chairman of barack obama<u+2019>s transition team. <u+201c>wait,<u+201d> you might think. john podesta is about as far from dissident politics as you can get. these leaks have produced genuine news. we finally got to see the text of mrs. clinton<u+2019>s paid speeches to goldman sachs, for example. what<u+2019>s wrong with that? doesn<u+2019>t that serve the public interest? the hacked emails did provide the public with some notable information. but any benefit of such mass data releases does not undo their harm. and that harm is relevant whether or not the data was stolen by a foreign government seeking to influence this election. the victims here are not just mr. podesta and the people in his contacts list who are embarrassed or compromised. the victim of leaks of private communication is the ability of dissidents to function in a democracy. demanding transparency from the powerful is not a right to see every single private email anyone in a position of power ever sent or received. wikileaks, for example, gleefully tweeted to its millions of followers that a clinton foundation employee had attempted suicide; news outlets repeated the report. wanton destruction of the personal privacy of any person who has ever come near a political organization is a vicious but effective means to smother dissent. this method is so common in russia and the former soviet states that it has a name: <u+201c>kompromat,<u+201d> releasing compromising material against political opponents. emails of dissidents are hacked, their houses bugged, the activities in their bedrooms videotaped, and the material made public to embarrass and intimidate people whose politics displeases the powerful. kompromat does not have to go after every single dissident to work: if you know that getting near politics means that your personal privacy may be destroyed, you will understandably stay away. data dumps by wikileaks have outed rape victims and gay people in saudi arabia, private citizens<u+2019> emails and personal information in turkey , and the voice mail messages of democratic national committee staff members. dissent requires the right to privacy: to be let alone in our vulnerabilities and the ability to form our thoughts and share them when we choose. these hacks undermine that crucial right. mass data releases, like the podesta emails, conflate things that the public has a right to know with things we have no business knowing, with a lot of material in the middle about things we may be curious about and may be of some historical interest, but should not be released in this manner. all campaigns need to have internal discussions. taking one campaign manager<u+2019>s email account and releasing it with zero curation in the last month of an election needs to be treated as what it is: political sabotage, not whistle-blowing. these hacks also function as a form of censorship. once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information. in this era of information overload, censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus. these dumps, combined with the news media<u+2019>s obsession with campaign trivia and gossip, have resulted in whistle-drowning, rather than whistle-blowing: in a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one. what is the right response, then, to living in a world where we will see more mass hacks of information, and more titillating and occasionally newsworthy private communication made public? the answer is not simply to tell people to stop writing things down. <u+201c>don<u+2019>t discuss things over email if you don<u+2019>t want to see them on cnn<u+201d> is the new <u+201c>don<u+2019>t wear a miniskirt if you don<u+2019>t want to get assaulted.<u+201d> that would take us back to the pre-internet world where only the powerful could communicate with ease. people with resources will create their own online gated communities <u+2014> buying more expensive, secure devices, hiring specialists and flying around more to meet in person <u+2014> while dissident groups with fewer resources will be left behind. since these hackers won<u+2019>t stop, we need to build resilience by emphasizing curation, context and ethics, and by no longer acting as if something that has been hacked and dumped is all up for grabs. journalism ethics have to transition from the time of information scarcity to the current realities of information glut and privacy invasion. for example, obsessively reporting on internal campaign discussions about strategy from the (long ago) primary, in the last month of a general election against a different opponent, is not responsible journalism. out-of-context emails from wikileaks have fueled viral misinformation on social media. journalists should focus on the few important revelations, but also help debunk false misinformation that is proliferating on social media. those of us who aren<u+2019>t reporters need better ways to respond, too. these hacks are done to steal our attention and to confuse us; the only effective response is to refuse to play this game on the hackers<u+2019> terms. in old-school access journalism, journalists trade access for docile coverage, and we are often served gossip or trivia: the kind the powerful would like us to know. in this form of hacked emails, we still get gossip and trivia. but we get the kind the hackers want us to focus on, while distracting us from the real issues. we can<u+2019>t shrug off these dangers just because these hackers have, so far, largely made relatively powerful people and groups their targets. their true target is the health of our democracy. zeynep tufekci is an associate professor at the university of north carolina school of information and library science and a contributing opinion writer. follow the new york times opinion section on facebook and twitter (@nytopinion) , and sign up for the opinion today newsletter . a version of this op-ed appears in print on november 5, 2016, on page a19 of the new york edition with the headline: whistle-drowning,  not whistle-blowing. today's paper | subscribe
wikileaks isn<u+2019>t whistleblowing
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