(NewsNation) — An Air National Guardsman has been arrested for allegedly leaking more than 100 classified documents about the war in Ukraine in what’s become one of the major intelligence disclosures in recent years.
The investigation has drawn comparisons to the Edward Snowden case, but former prosecutors see greater parallels with the 2018 prosecution of defense contractor Reality Winner. She was sentenced to more than five years for leaking an intelligence report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.
Winner shared the information with the media and served more than four years in prison before being released. The documents relating to Ukraine and other intelligence gathered by the United States was initially confined to a small online chat group on the messaging platform Discord.
Here’s a brief history of major intelligence leaks over the past 15 years and what they exposed:
Russian election interference efforts
- Date: 2017
- Leaker: Reality Winner, a former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor
- Scale: Printed out a classified intelligence report at the National Security Agency facility in Georgia where she worked and provided it to journalists at the investigative news outlet The Intercept
- Revelation: NSA analysis of Russia’s attempt to penetrate U.S. election systems before the 2016 election
NSA Surveillance
- Date: June 2013
- Leaker: Edward Snowden
- Scale: 7,000 classified documents were released. Intelligence officials have estimated Snowden may have taken 1.7 million classified files
- Revelation: NSA collected the telephone records from millions of Verizon customers and accessed and collected data through back doors into U.S. internet companies such as Google and Facebook with a program called Prism
State Department Cables
- November 2010 to September 2011
- Leaker: WikiLeaks
- Scale: More than 250,000 unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables dating from December 1966 to February 2010 were released
- Revelation: Documents included verification that the U.S. had conducted secret drone strikes in Yemen, details of U.S. efforts to get information on United Nations representatives, a push by Saudi Arabia’s royal family to have the U.S. strike Iran and a description of Russia under Vladimir Putin as a “virtual mafia state”
Army manual for Guantanamo prison camp
- Date: November 2007
- Leaker: WikiLeaks
- Scale: A 238-page Army manual from 2003 on “standard operating procedures” for the Camp Delta prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
- Revelation: The manual showed the Army had a policy of keeping some prisoners from Red Cross inspectors and holding new prisoners in isolation for two weeks to make them more compliant for interrogators