Not to concede that no laws were broken, since even Arlen Specter seems to think that the NSA thing was over the line, but why should the question of technical legal violation determine whether a leak is "good" or "bad"? And how is a potential leaker even to know whether the law is being broken in a particular case? Even granting that the NSA thing is a close call, there are legitimate arguments to be made that the administration policy is illegal; how do you propose that an employee with information regarding such a program, who may or may not be a lawyer, make that determination?
The "breach of law" standard for judging leaks is a silly rationalization for Republican apologists who want to pretend that there's nothing wrong with widespread government wiretapping, CIA kidnapping, and networks of secret prisons, so long as a case can be made that no laws were technically violated. As a lawyer, I can assure you that some case can be made that no technical violation occurred even in the most egregious of circumstances. We all know an abuse of government power when we see it, and the key distinction between the Rove incident and the NSA, etc., incidents is that in the former case, the leak itself was an instance of governmental abuse, whereas in the latter, the leak was an attempt at rectifying an existing abuse.
