More on the Leaked NSA Report

The Intercept, a journalism website funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar and run by investigative journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, produced an important scoop Monday.

Its article, drawn from a classified National Security Agency document the Intercept said it received anonymously, exposed “a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure.” Absent the website’s publication, we might never have learned about the Russian attack aimed at a U.S. vendor of voter registration systems.

America's sprawling elections infrastructure has been called "a hairball" — but as people in Silicon Valley might ask, is that a feature or a bug? Then-FBI Director James Comey touted it as a good thing — "the beauty of our system," he told Congress, is that the "hairball" is too vast, unconnected and woolly to be hacked from the outside.

That was before Monday's leak of a top secret National Security Agency report about a Russian election cyberattack. What that document confirms is that if the whole is safe, its...