More than 53 years ago, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair in Sing-Sing prison for their part in revealing nuclear secrets to our dangerous (and, according to the trial judge, terrorist) enemy the Soviet Union.
I doubt whether times have changed. If, for instance, I were to post on the WorldWide Web engineering details (with explanations conveniently written in Arabic, for use by evil Islamofascists everywhere) about the construction of nuclear devices, I suspect that I would very shortly be pacing up and down in a narrow little cell, wondering whether or not my lawyer could get bail granted (he couldn't!) and what my trial judge would say at sentencing (one thing for certain: it would not be "Go, and sin no more!").
Of course, I'm not the President of the United States.
The President, at the urging of certain Republican members of Congress, apparently has the right to post such nuclear secrets for all to read, in the hope that the documents concerned (which come originally from Iraq) will somehow prove his 2003 case that the invasion of Iraq was justified by the fact that they were about ready to drop bombs on American cities (remember Condi Rice's "smoking gun" = "mushroom cloud"?). The IAEA apparently pointed out that the documents posted contained sensitive materials; the administration ignored them. John Negroponte, head of the US intelligence establishment and not known as an opponent of rampant Republicanism, urged the President not to have this material posted; the Great Decider ignored him. Only when the New York Times, once again proving the Liberal Bias of the Media, published a story about the website and its contents did the President have the documents removed. Which, of course, is closing the barn door after the horse is already on a plane to Waziristan; even if every government in the world has not already copied those documents onto its own thumb drives (1GB version now available at Fry's for $25), almost certainly automatic web robots have copied and filed the documents in several thousand other places on the web, as a matter of routine.
The sad fact is that while the engineering details remain, for many countries (and perhaps some private organizations such as al-Qaida), extremely useful — at least in pointing out what dead-ends to avoid in their nuclear research — the political value of the documents is at best antique. The documents relate to a 1980s program that ended in the early 1990s. The documents were first made available by the Iraqi government to the IAEA in 1991, and again in 2002; they show nothing about what Saddam Hussein may or may not have been doing in early 2003 (building atomic cannons out of aluminum tubing? buying uranium from Niger?). Posting these documents to the internet was an exercise in futility, from the political point of view. From an engineering viewpoint, they constitute the sort of treason for which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed.