Hello and welcome to the second season of Malicious Life.

I'm Ramlan.

Leakers and truth-tellers, whistleblowers, have always been an integral part of the complex game played by governments and media in democratic countries.

But if there's something that has changed in the modern era, it is the vast amount of information

a potential whistleblower is exposed to in the workplace, and therefore the vast amount of information which he or she can expose to the public.

Digital databases have made document creation and storage simple and easy, so the number of documents we produce

has increased accordingly.

For example, Time magazine reports that the number of confidential documents produced by the US government

has increased since 1996 from 5.5 million to more than 54 million documents in 2009. I don't know how many classified

documents Mark felt, Deepthroat, leaked to the press in Watergate, but I'm

pretty sure it's far less than the 1,800,000 documents

revealed by Snowden or the 11. half million documents revealed in the so-called Panama Papers

exposure of 2016. The question that interests me and which we will discuss in this episode is what effect

this mega-legage of the millions and millions of classified documents has had on the behavior and

decision-making of governments in the modern era.

Do such huge exposures have a significant impact on our governing bodies?

Or perhaps the leak of one explosive document has the same effect, more or less, as leaking a million documents does. The example on which

this episode will be based is not Edward Snowden's. I will devote a separate

episode in malicious life to his story.

For this episode I chose another story almost as famous but much more interesting in my opinion.

The story of Bradley but much more interesting in my opinion.

The story of Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning.

...