The leakers that come to mind immediately are Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning whom both suffered greatly for their leaks (Snowden had to leave his life behind and Manning was kept in isolation and had her medical needs neglected amongst other things). While they both may have wanted to be recognized as having done something good, they also clearly wanted to let the public know what the government was doing in their name.
I never understood why Snowden and Manning are put on equal footing in that regard.
Now granted, the mission plans would have been pretty interesting to the other team (I almost wrote the word enemy, but I don't believe that to be accurate, but that's irrelevant to this post), but those were printed out and ended up laying around on desks, all the platoon leaders / platoon sergeants had them, and despite best efforts to keep track of that stuff it is never 100%.
Granted, Chelsea may have had WAY more access than I did, I'm not trying to speak about things I have no facts regarding. I am trying to say that I find it VERY hard to believe that an E-4 intel soldier (or even most O-6's, to be honest) would have access to anything that could compromise field intelligence activities or actionable information about the goings on with special forces teams. The overwhelming majority of the information we had on SIPR (basically the 'secret' internet for USG, the computers with red cables coming out of them) relevant to the local theater of operations was an insanely disorganized mess of reports following missions, almost none of which had anything juicy in them.
Having become a software engineer and math guy after getting out of the service, looking back on the "information" available to US and allied commanders in Afghanistan I'm 100% certain that my current boss would fire me for delivering such a mess.
EDIT Looked up Manning's unit level: Full Disclosure: Chelsea Manning worked in a Brigade level S-2 (intel section), and I was only at Battalion, so she definitely had better systems / access than I did. I still doubt she could find out what Jason Bourne was up to.
No. Foreign agents or sources working with US intelligence (which are not the same as operatives) maybe.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/20/chelsea-mann...
Manning at least spent her day in court. Yeah they are different, Snowden was a coward. If he truly did it for the good of the world, he'd turn himself in because of the reward he has already gotten by sharing information he felt like the world needed.
" If he truly did it for the good of the world, he'd turn himself in because of the reward he has already gotten by sharing information he felt like the world needed."
This is offensively manipulative nonsense. Wanting to avoid being thrown in a hole and tortured is a normal human response and utterly orthogonal to whether his motives were pure or not.
You must be heavily influenced by things you’ve read/heard others say.
As a human being - just imagine what you might do... Perhaps you’ll begin to realise how palpably absurd your suggestion that someone must be a coward for not taking their beating is.
As an example there's a short discussion in the recent movie The Post where Post reporters are trying to figure out who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Ben Bagdikian says something like these guys are always a bit of a showboat and it leads him to remember Ellsberg at Rand.
EDIT to add: the CIA is interested in why people leak because the #1 job of the CIA is to create leakers in other countries.
You mention locking people up, but that is not the CIA's job. The FBI is the counter-intelligence lead in the U.S.
The CIA only locks up brown people and tortures them in Thailand (star). It refers US leakers to the FBI which throws them into lonely prisons, terrifies, and abuses them.
EDIT: (star) Or rather it did. That's what Gina Haspel, our new CIA director nominee, is famous for.
EDIT2: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/why-the-washin...
A conflict of interest would be relevant, in different ways, if it was current with the events that the movie is about, or if the movie was produced by the Post.
But neither of those is true, sonit seems to be a non-sequitur.
After throwing out the all but three of the original 100 people saying one of the other 9 were the best skin cream.
The strongest common trait in leakers is belief. They believe in something. They aren't willing to sit back and witness some people damage society as a whole.
People have been trying much harder and more successfully to discredit Snowden using other arguments.
The characterisation actually makes me more hopeful for the future of whistle blowing.
I'd assume most intelligence services love leakers. They just want to be the recipient, not the source.
