Basically same thing Snowden did except he leaked to fewer people who were a bit more reliable. The problems were two fold:
1. A pile of unredacted, classified, and legitimate operations in the hand of foreigners which included at least two being targeted by them. They should've never had this information. He could have cherry-picked it to whistleblowing stuff during time he organized all of it but didn't. I'd have done the opposite to protect legit ops and sources.
2. He put all that at risk of foreign agencies, esp in Russia or China, getting it given their hackers are badass while reporters' IT groups are... average. After seeing Citizenfour, I was pretty confident his stuff could've been grabbed multiple times if he didn't have the element of surprise. It was also clear his tradecraft was weak vs what I read about in espionage non-fiction. I bet the journalists more so.
So, definitely parallels to Manning. I expected it from Manning over Snowden given Manning was a stressed-out youth going through an identity crisis in a war zone whereas Snowden was a trained spy claiming moral high ground in general and aiming to protect decent people. I'm not letting him off on dumping the foreign stuff. Especially while many of the targets do the same shit to us with local, legal protections for their own spies doing it. He needs to own up to that.
1. A pile of unredacted, classified, and legitimate operations in the hand of foreigners which included at least two being targeted by them. They should've never had this information. He could have cherry-picked it to whistleblowing stuff during time he organized all of it but didn't. I'd have done the opposite to protect legit ops and sources.
2. He put all that at risk of foreign agencies, esp in Russia or China, getting it given their hackers are badass while reporters' IT groups are... average. After seeing Citizenfour, I was pretty confident his stuff could've been grabbed multiple times if he didn't have the element of surprise. It was also clear his tradecraft was weak vs what I read about in espionage non-fiction. I bet the journalists more so.
So, definitely parallels to Manning. I expected it from Manning over Snowden given Manning was a stressed-out youth going through an identity crisis in a war zone whereas Snowden was a trained spy claiming moral high ground in general and aiming to protect decent people. I'm not letting him off on dumping the foreign stuff. Especially while many of the targets do the same shit to us with local, legal protections for their own spies doing it. He needs to own up to that.