In a New York Times opinion piece last week, Ian Bateson, a former Kyiv Post staff writer, echoed many critics in demanding that the Ukrainian government “shut down” Myrotvorets and bring criminal charges against the people responsible for the leak.

Really? Governments closing websites and prosecuting bloggers is usually called censorship. Indeed, the zeal with which people who should know better are demanding that Myrotvorets be silenced or punished is surprising. The principles of free speech prohibit censorship without compelling reasons and this case presents none.

First of all, journalists don’t have special rights. The reporters on the list have the same “amount” of free speech rights as the Myrotvorets bloggers and the rest of us.

But before getting to that, let’s unpack the facts. In March, the DNR “information minister” boasted that her office had registered over 7,000 journalists since 2014. Myrotvorets — which “names and shames” people from the Russian-separatist forces — responded by hacking the registration list and posting it to their blog. They said it was in the public interest because the listed people had “cooperated with the fighters of a terrorist organization.”

The list includes more than 5,000 names, media affiliations, phone numbers and emails. No one has disputed its authenticity.

According to an analysis by Texty.org, half the listed “journalists” were Russian and DNR propagandists. Nearly all the rest were foreign media (with Ukrainian fixers and translators) who went to the occupied areas in 2014 because of the Malaysian airliner crash. Only nine Ukrainian media outlets were listed, including three connected with Viktor Yanukovich cronies.

The list came to public attention when lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko announced it to his 157,000 Facebook followers on May 10. Media and political circles exploded with outrage over what everyone thought was a violation of the journalists’ rights.

On Monday, for example, in declaring Gerashchenko an “enemy of the press”, the Institute of Mass Information NGO blamed him for supporting Myrotvorets’s publication of what it termed “personal data”. Other sources have called it “private”.

But it is neither: Not under Ukrainian, European or American law — or common sense. Open societies don’t consider names and contact information to be personal or private. Ask your local telemarketer or spammer. In the days of printed telephone books; names, addresses and phone numbers were delivered to every door. Now, it can take but a few clicks online to find a phone or email.

Besides, journalists are public figures. Contrary to what the Myrotvorets critics seem to believe, they have less privacy – not more – when it relates to the subjects they cover. In this case, people voluntarily gave their contacts to an illegal armed force on occupied territory in a war zone crawling with Russian agents. No reasonable journalists could have expected that information to stay private. Not in the age of Wikileaks, Panama Papers and Kremlin information wars.

Critics say the list endangers journalists and their ability to do their jobs, though it is unclear how. Some recent entries are from February but the vast majority are almost two years old. The foreign media that covered MH17 are long gone and Ukrainian reporters mostly stopped going to the occupied areas in 2015 after a rash of kidnappings. For those who still do, it’s unclear how the list affects them. If they were on the list, the DNR already knows they were there. If they weren’t, why would the list matter? Who are they in danger from? Crazed Ukrainian nationalists?

The list is really a historical document – and a very interesting one, actually. But that is a different subject.

Of course, if reporters are seriously threatened, the perpetrators should be prosecuted – but it doesn’t mean the publication should be censored. Thus far, however, there have been few, if any, credible reports. Hromadske TV’s Nastya Stanko said she received threatening text messages, for example.

But she actually wasn’t on the list.

Even so, the threat would need to be objectively more serious than the usual social media chatter prompted by Stanko’s and other journalists’ reporting in general. After all, these are the days of the Russian troll. You need a thick skin to cover Ukraine.

Which brings us to the last complaint: Myrotvorets asserted that the people on the list had “cooperated” with terrorists. Ian Bateson considers it defamatory and wants the people who said it shut down and punished. Otherwise, he says, it means that Ukraine has declared war on journalism.

Or maybe it means that Ukraine is actually protecting people who have the same free speech rights he does. Myrotvorets’s work is also “journalism”, for that matter: As Timothy Garton Ash put it in his recent book Free Speech: “You don’t have to be a journalist to do journalism.”

If reporters feel defamed, the democratic remedy is a private lawsuit -– though they would probably lose.

As public figures, they would have to prove that Myrotvorets knowingly spread lies when it said the listed people “cooperated” with terrorists. But that would present the difficult task of showing that a journalist who registers with an illegal entity like the DNR and follows its rules in exchange for access to territory it controls was not “cooperating.”

Of course, it was justified to get information with great public interest. The foreign press covering MH17 brought world attention to Russian involvement in the Donbas war. Some Ukrainian media reported from the occupied territories because the DNR made it a condition for hostage exchanges. In a defamation case, however, proving that cooperation was justified is not the same as proving that it wasn’t cooperation at all.

So, if Myrotvorets’s revealed no private information, caused no credible threats or crimes, and wasn’t defamatory; friends of free speech in Ukraine might want to reconsider their criticism of the government for not doing anything about it. It shouldn’t.

Indeed, if Myrotvorets was censored for such flimsy reasons, it would set a terrible precedent posing a far greater threat to free speech than the list itself.

That said, even if it was legally protected speech, I don’t think Myrotvorets should have labeled all the journalists the way it did.

But free speech protects me when I’m wrong, too.

Mary Mycio is an author and lawyer. She was director of the IREX Legal Defense and Education Program for Ukrainian journalists.