I wonder who the NY Times mule was?

[99th_Monkey]

1. What I don't get is this: why in the age of the interwebs w/ digitized data, any of this matters

I mean so what if someone has something on a thumb drive? That same data could
just as easily been uploaded (from one place) to Wikileaks (or some such site), and
then downloaded from the same site, at some other location after having crossed
a national?

So given THIS scenario, is anyone being a "mule"? ... or can anyone even do much of
anything about it?

Seems to me we're (or they're) trying to stuff the digital genie back in the bottle, to no
avail, but "the authorities" seem oblivious to all this, still acting like they did when paper
documents were the currency, such as when Elsberg broke the Pentagon Papers.