I don't see on what grounds they can charge anyone. The documents are not classified, they weren't claimed as official USG property by the NSA, and downloading the torrent is any more or less illegal than reading the leaked Snowden power points online.

> The documents are not classified

They are not marked as classified. That is something different than not being classified. Any US person with any sort of national security-related job, or any hopes of ever getting one, should think twice.

It's like having a stealth fighter crash in your back yard (this has happened). The pieces are not marked as being classified, but selling them on ebay isn't going to win you friends.

That could go also for reading the material released by Snowden not to mention wikileaks.

But overall I don't think this would affect you having a security clearance in the future, this isn't the first time leaks happened and I somehow doubt that it would affect security screening.

You are asked a question along the lines of "have you been ever exposed to classified information without having an explicit permission" if you say yes it was on cover of the goddamn washington post they can't do much.

Saying that it was leaked all of the internet, reported by 100's of news sources, fully analysed and you've looked at it yourself to see if you can learn anything from it isn't going to hurt you either.

But overall this isn't like a stealth fighter crashed in your backyard, it's like a stealth fighter crashed in China, they reverse engineered it, mass produced it, it was reviewed by everyone on the planet and you got one to try it out.

Or, if you torrent these files, the question "have you ever passed classified materials to someone not authorized to receive them?"

>reported by 100's of news sources

That really doesn't matter for many people. Anyone with any links whatsoever to the US military (a large chunk of the US population, including retirees) is bound by orders not to read classified material despite it being all over the newspapers/CNN. This was and still is a big deal re the Snowden material.

The Snowden material had these "SECRET" or "TOP SECRET" tags on every page (as seen on TV, of course!) This software tools, however, probably don't have anything like this, as, if I understand correctly, they are the binaries that should look "innocent" and fully unrelated to the US organizations in any event they are discovered, as some of them were already discovered with Stuxnet and similar events.

So I don't even see how they can be considered "classified" if the US doesn't officially admit they produced them. As far as I understand, there's nothing that carries their signs or any other such marks (like "top secret US government property").

For the reference, the production of Stuxnet by the US was never officially admitted. So you still don't have to answer you've seen something declared as secret by the US if you've seen a report about Stuxnet. And I honestly don't expect the US will soon admit the production of it officially. Unofficially, sure, there's that NYT article reporting what some "American officials" said.

all the threats to my self-determination were exactly why I left a potentially bright or uninteresting career in defense contracting

IANAL, but I think that you'd be OK, even if it were marked as classified. I base this on the case of the Pentagon Papers [1]. As I understand it, no prosecution of the Times was possible here because by the time they got their hands on the documents, they had already been leaked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#The_Supreme_Co...

It's inadvisable because the US three letter agencies are known to disappear people without even a whiff of legal reason.

IIRC it's not illegal to view or possess classified material, only illegal to be the one leaking it.

Not if we all do it.

Its perfectly fine .. if your name ends with Clinton.