The Biggest Exposure of Classified Secrets Since Edward Snowden

On the menu today, the U.S. government and its allies are grappling with the biggest exposure of classified secrets since Edward Snowden, revealing what the U.S. knows about dwindling Ukrainian air-defense assets and ammunition, our spying on ally South Korea, a possible Mossad role in Israel’s recent protests, and a Russian hack on a Canadian natural-gas pipeline that the Canadians say didn’t happen.

Roughly 1.3 million Americans have top-secret security clearance, and apparently one of them with a bottle of Gorilla Glue on their desk decided to take pictures of those documents. Read on.

A Whole Bunch of America’s Biggest Secrets, Revealed on the Internet

There are often harmful consequences when government agencies that deal with national security “stovepipe” intelligence — that is, keep it to themselves and don’t share it with other agencies. For the U.S. government to operate effectively when dealing with little-known or little-noticed threats or attempting to persuade or influence other governments, multiple government agencies need to know who’s doing what, where, and when, and coordinate their actions.

But when agencies don’t stovepipe sensitive or classified information, and, say, the Central Intelligence Agency shares a lot of what it knows with the Pentagon, they can end up with problems like the one currently wracking the highest levels of the U.S. government, as the Wall Street Journal lays out: