Steven Carter of the Daily Beast on the release of the pentagon papers 40 years after Daniel Ellsberg leaked them.The formal release of the Pentagon Papers by the Defense Department on June 13 garnered only passing news coverage. In this age of WikiLeaks, when too many of those to whom confidences are entrusted keep them only long enough to figure out which friend to tell first, it is easy to forget the existence of an earlier era, when rules of secrecy were taken seriously, and the publication of classified data was considered a scandal. The case arose in 1971, when The New York Times and The Washington Post published excerpts from a top-secret Pentagon study of American policy in Vietnam. At the time, the newspapers were doing something brave and new, and might have faced criminal contempt citations for their actions, had not the Supreme Court, in a case the outcome of which in those days seemed anything but certain, stepped in to protect them.