Did any leakers care to leak only the information relevant to the corruption? No. I do have color vision. I see the most blackish grey. And so should you. Yet you all cling to that little white spot in the middle of all the blackness, and using it to justify everything. You're sending a very clear message to all would-be traitors: as long you throw us a little bone of government wrongdoing, you're wellcome to burn the whole house down. You think this makes any sense at all?
You know that there can be more than one "patriot" in any given scenario, right?
The guy who actually exfiltrates a DB dump on a USB stick is one guy, and he might be a sociopath. But he (usually) doesn't just post it to the Internet; instead, he gives it to a journalist.
Now, is the journalist also a sociopath? Probably not. Probably he cares about lives that would be lost if actual "actively sensitive" classified information was leaked. So he doesn't publish that information. He just looks for the stuff that works as "news": basically, things that hurt the government (as a bureaucratic entity) without hurting the state (as a body representing the people.) He takes the body-destroying toxin he was sent, and purifies it down until it's a chemotherapy treatment. And then he hands it to his editor, who also cares what happens to the country, and they talk about it with the publisher, who in turn advocates for the positions held by the boards of the companies behind the ads that run in the paper, who might also be patriots...
In short, to the degree that "leaks" are mostly something that happen through the media, not through lone vigilantes, there is a sieve of probabilistic patriotism reducing the "splash damage" of any leak. The media is not a "fifth column."
