News leak

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A news leak is the unsanctioned release of

Leaks are often made by employees of an organization who happened to have access to interesting information but who are not officially authorized to disclose it to the press. They may believe that doing so is in the public interest due to the need for speedy publication, because it otherwise would not have been able to be made public, or to rally opinion to their side of an internal debate. This type of leak is common; as former White House advisor Sidney Souers advised a young scholar in 1957, "there are no leaks in Washington, only plants."^[2]

On the other hand, leaks can sometimes be made simply as self-promotion, to elevate the leaker as a person of importance. Leaks can be intentional or unintentional. A leaker may be doing the journalist a personal favor (possibly in exchange for future cooperation), or simply wishes to disseminate secret information in order to affect the news. The latter type of leak is often made anonymously.

Sometimes partial information is released to the media

Some people who leak information to the media are seeking to manipulate coverage. Cloaking information in secrecy may make it seem more valuable to journalists, and anonymity reduces the ability of others to cross-check or discredit the information.^[3]

Some leaks are made in the open; for example, politicians who (whether inadvertently or otherwise) disclose classified or confidential information while speaking to the press.

Leaks can have strong consequences. President

• Politicians and policy makers may wish to judge the reaction of the public to their plans before committing (a trial balloon). Leaked information may be plausibly denied without blame for proposed unpopular measures affecting their perpetrators.
• People with access to confidential information may find it to their advantage to make it public, without themselves appearing to be responsible for publishing the information. For example, information which will embarrass political opponents, or cause damage to national security, may be leaked.
• People privy to secret information about matters which they consider to be
  whistleblowers
  " — may leak the information.
• People may be enticed to expose secret information for other self-serving motives, such as financial gain.

Notable

International

• The Panama Papers, confidential documents leaked on 3 April 2016 regarding offshore tax havens.
• The Paradise Papers, confidential documents leaked on 5 November 2017 regarding offshore tax havens.
• The
  FinCEN
  documents brought to the public's attention in September 2020.
• The Pandora Papers, confidential documents leaked on 3 October 2021 regarding offshore tax havens.

United States

• Leaks to the press were commonly made by both sides of the U.S. government's internal debate during August 1949–January 1950 regarding whether to proceed with development of the
  hydrogen bomb.^[2]
• The
  New York Times in 1971.^[5]
• A source known as Deep Throat, later identified as FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, leaked information related to the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
• Columnist Robert Novak published a leak, outing CIA agent Valerie Plame in 2003.
• As reported in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, the CIA deliberately planted false stories with the media to mislead the public, while claiming the stories were leaked.^[6]
• The United States diplomatic cables leak of November 2010 in which the organisation WikiLeaks began releasing details of 251,287 US diplomatic cables provided to them by Chelsea Manning.
• The
  PRISM and the British Tempora, clandestine espionage programs.^[7]
• The
  CIA employee Joshua Adam Schulte leaked secret documents exposing the capabilities of the CIA to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare.^[8][9]

• CND and the Committee of 100
  who publicised government preparations for rule after a nuclear war. In 1963 they broke into a secret government bunker where they photographed and copied documents. They published this information in a pamphlet, Danger! Official Secret RSG-6. Four thousand copies were sent to the national press, politicians and peace movement activists.
• The
  PRISM
  clandestine espionage programs.

• Israel's nuclear weapons program
  to the British press in 1986.
• Israeli Defense Force in 2008, which suggested the Israeli military had been engaged in extrajudicial killings
  .

• At the time of the Spanish coup of July 1936, the takeover of the Spanish Republican Navy by coup leaders failed mainly because the messages calling for a coup against the Spanish Republic were not sent in code, as would have been the norm, from Ciudad Lineal to the senior officers commanding the ships. Navy radiotelegrapher Benjamin Balboa took credit for the news leak.^[10]

China

• Leaked minutes from an internal meeting of China's
  The Financial Times said it was Sun Yang – a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – who presented the figures to officials during the closed-door briefing, citing two people familiar with the matter.^[12][13]
• In November 2019, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the China Cables, consisting of six documents, an "operations manual" for running the camps and detailed use of predictive policing and AI to target people and regulate life inside the camps.^[14][15]
• Document Number Nine is a confidential internal document widely circulated within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2013 by the General Office of the CCP.^[16][17] The document warns of seven dangerous Western values, allegedly including media freedom and judicial independence.

See also

• Internet leak
• GlobaLeaks (software)

Books and references

• Blair Jr., Clay, Silent Victory: The US Submarine War against Japan, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001
• Lanning, Michael Lee (Lt. Col.), Senseless Secrets: The Failures of U.S. Military Intelligence from George Washington to the Present, Carol Publishing Group, 1995

References