I really dislike the way Wikileaks and this journalist get huge dumps of information then trickle feed it out, and ultimately don't end up releasing most of it. It's almost like they are deliberately giving the USG enough time to shut them down. Infuriating would be an understatement.
On the other hand, trickling it out keeps the entire issue at the fore-front of the public's attention rather than burning out in a week and being done with it. Also, as some have said, it allows those involved to come out with statements which may later be contradicted by further releases of evidence (i.e. giving the government a chance to hang themselves).
There was an NPR interview a few years ago with someone at Wikileaks (must have been Assange, do they have another public face?). They used to release information in dumps, nobody paid attention. Teasing it out was the only way to get the media to bite. It's not a very appealing strategy to those who just want the information, but a response to the current state of affairs, I guess.
Well...provide the dump to as many other journalists as you can first, then trickle it out. It just doesn't seem like a valid reason to sit on the whole lot yourself, surely providing a guarantee that the information will get out eventually is more important than the media management aspect.
And besides, based on this theory, the stream of information being released should speed up, as once you have the worlds attention, they will pay attention to more. But we tend to see an initial release of explosive information, followed by a gradually diminishing stream of information - I am thinking back to Cablegate in particular - until it basically switches off and you never hear anything again.
