FBI Director Christopher Wray said that his sentence should serve as "a stark warning to all those entrusted with protecting national defense information: betray that trust, and you will be held accountable."
They mean business! For real this time. No take backs. While supplies last. Void in some states. Not all locations participate. Some restrictions apply.
No idea why they worded the article that way. The person going to prison is the person who leaked the documents and was also the admin of the discord server they leaked it to.
In the 2000s I thought that due to more and more people being on the internet, stories like this would be very common in the future, not just for the government, but private entities too.
In reality: Most things that happen at most workplaces are not interesting enough to leak, and most people do not want to risk their careers for something like this. So it's still relatively rare.
Publish absolutely every government document. There should be no such thing as a secret government document ever. If you don't want it known, don't collect it. Don't generate it.
And if all records had to be public, there would have been a hell of a lot lower chance of nuclear weapons being invented. Because who would want to give that weapon to everybody else as well as themselves?
And? For the average country, the difficult thing about nuclear weapons is not how to build one (pipe with two halves and a bit explosives is enough for a few kt) but to get enough Plutonium. You know, the whole thing with Israel running secret facilities with ceramic centrifuges for years. What US and China are wasting a few MW computer center each year on, is getting a bit more out of it than the competition, especially fusion weapons. Seen rationally, it's a childish "i have the bigger dick boom".
While I disagree with OP, that kind of information isn't classified. It's personally identifiable information which is restricted and secured, but it's not classified in the same sense as the person who leaked on discord.
In response to op, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to classify information that are not nefarious. For example, a diagram explaining the security systems for a building. It's better to restrict access to that document so it is less likely for an adversary to see the details, because all that would really do is enable them to identify weaknesses which they could exploit. Generally this sort of thing is called operational security and I think it is actually the basis for the US government's mandatory access control in the first place (e.g. "loose lips sink ships").
Why would the government know your voting history? Isn't voting anonymous where you live?
No idea what a tax id is but in Sweden everyone's home address, income, phone number, "personnummer" (a unique ID assigned to every citizen), and some other stuff. And for the most part it works pretty well. I'm usually concerned about privacy but I don't mind this because it applies to everyone equally (except a few people with protected identity for safety reasons) and it's just so open and convenient.
I'm not saying that all government documents should be public information but here most documents are.
Yep, everyone should know nuclear codes, inside agents in terrorist cells, where to strike to kill as many and do as much damage as possible, how to manufacture weapons and IEDs...