Is Wikileaks like the Pentagon papers? The website says it's a champion of democracy. But some say it goes too far.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica

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Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by a group of anti-secrecy activists led by Julian Assange, an Australian journalist. It has gained notoriety in recent months for posting hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--some of which it shared with The New York Times and The Guardian in London, among others. Though the publication of government secrets during wartime raises many of the issues the Pentagon Papers case did about free speech and national security, Wikileaks has also complicated the debate in important ways.

Some question whether Wikileaks deserves the same press protections as newspapers like The Times, which has a policy of editing out material that might compromise national security. Wikileaks, by contrast, posts vast amounts of information indiscriminately, which some say endangers the lives of American soldiers.

The Internet, which has made copying and sharing information so easy, is also changing the business of whistleblowing. In 1970 and 1971, Daniel Ellsberg had to manually photocopy 7,000 documents over several months before sharing them with The Times. By contrast, Private Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence...