Now a spy, traitor or whistle-blower can put gigabytes of data on a fingernail-sized card and pass them on anonymously, irretrievably and all but instantly.
The new rules try to correct this, for example by allowing a reward to be paid in some circumstances to whistle-blowers who only grumble internally.
The attempt to manipulate public sentiment, exposed by a rare whistle-blower, angered the public and energised the media.
After Enron, an energy firm, collapsed in a flurry of fraud, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002 which, among other things, protected whistle-blowers from retaliation.
Litvinenko was a former Russian security agent who came to Britain in 2000 after turning whistle-blower on the FSB.
Sadly, as a number of high-profile criminal cases against whistle-blowers show, the Obama administration has followed its predecessor in aggressively cracking down on unauthorized leaks.
A Queens teenager and his 27-year-old accomplice received stiff prison terms yesterday form a judge who cited their " callous disregard" for life in torching the home of narcotics whistle-blower Argune.
Wikileaks, an international publishing service for whistle-blowers, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its sources, but it cannot control them.
