It is ten years since Edward Snowden walked out of the NSA (National Security Agency) with a lot of classified documents that exposed US mass surveillance both internationally and on Americans. Many of the revelations were embarrassing for the United States, not least that it had spied on the leaders of other allied countries.
Since then, leaks have come and gone in the United States. Secret sources have told the media about classified information, and most recently in February this year it was discovered that 3000,<> gigabytes of emails from a counterterrorism unit of the Pentagon were available on an unprotected server, which could be accessed without a password.
But while the Snowden leak was very extensive and the leaked emails in February concerned a sensitive department, this week's roughly 100 or so leaked documents differ in several ways.
The documents are "very fresh"
One document describes South Korea's – until now – secret plans to send ammunition to Ukraine. Another appears to be a map of, among other things, Ukraine's defense against air strikes, dated March 1, 40 days ago.
If authentic, as seems likely, the documents could give Russia insight into details of Ukraine's defenses that it had not previously been aware of, and clues about Ukraine's military planning going forward. A source close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN that Ukraine has already been forced to change parts of its military planning as a consequence of the leak.
They risk countries' trust in the United States
Sometimes when Swedish authorities classify documents as secret, it is justified by the fact that other countries would not dare to share sensitive material if they thought that Sweden would disclose information to kreti and pleti. It is therefore not surprising that the US dealt with the crisis this weekend by contacting countries that appeared in the leaked documents. Including Ukraine.
May have been leaked without ideological reasons
Both Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, two whistleblowers who leaked secret information in the past, had ideological reasons for their actions. They felt that the US action was wrong and tried to do something about it. We do not yet know exactly how the latest Pentagon leak happened. But when the Bellingcat network reviewed the origin of the documents, the traces led to servers on the chat platform Discord, which often revolves around various computer games. So there is little to suggest at the moment that ideology is behind the leak.
All in all, the leak is very embarrassing for a U.S. that has a high intelligence posture, and the leak also comes at a time when Ukraine is just preparing for a spring offensive.