This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 14th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. A 21-year-old National Guardsman releases

key US classified documents to friends online.

The documents themselves detail U.S. plans with respect to war in Ukraine.

Cato's Eric Gomez and Patrick Eddington discussed the leak and some of the implications for securing military and intelligence secrets.

This leak concerned the war in Ukraine about, and it had a lot, there's a lot of information about US plans with

respect to Ukraine and I guess what what do we have to say about the nature of the substance of the

documents that was leaked just broadly? So I think broadly it's somewhat unsurprising in the sense that if you've been watching the Ukraine war unfold without any kind of access to classified intelligence, it's clear that the recent fighting around Bachmutt has gotten very much like a stalemate and the idea of an upcoming Ukrainian offensive that would sort of turn the tide and then put the Russians on the back foot. It's been announced. the that number two,

two, the ability for Ukraine to sort of have the wild success

that they had in a previous offensive

is at best, I think, relatively I think the content of the you know it

shed some more specific information about why that success could be doubtful but the broad strokes have been I think known for a long time.

So what I think is critical to understand here is that, and there are some folks, there's some

Natsek Hawks out there like Javad, Ali, and some others that are basically trying to conflate this leak with previous episodes of information, classified information, you know, episodes of information classified information you

know getting dumped out there and and there's really no comparison you know just in

Snowden's name of course has come up a lot because there are a lot of so-called

insider threat type things that were

instituted to try to preclude that kind of thing from happening again.

Let's just remind everyone listening to this that Edward Snowden exposed crimes against the Constitution

perpetrated by people in the executive branch charged with upholding

our constitutional rights. That's what Ed Snowden did. And that's why Snowden is a whistleblower in the classic sense just like

former Army Captain Chris Pyle, Dan Ellsburg, Tom Tam, and Chelsea Manning.

...