I thought the government lying their asses off again to the public was the real scandal.

It is astonishing that no one in the MSM is asking why the extent of the United States’ and Nato’s involvement in the proxy war in Ukraine is a secret in the first place. Citizens in a democracy have the right to know how much we are arming, training and planning the war for the Ukrainian military. At some point in the quest for clicks and likes journalists have forgotten their role in a democratic society and have become mouthpieces for the ruling elites. They learned nothing from Bush’s war and are making all the same mistakes with Biden’s war.

I fail to understand how someone was able to read a secret document on a plane.
That one action involves a multitude of security violations.

I can recall dealing with reports that were numbered and individually accounted for – actual security. Any document available electronically is subject to easy duplication and distribution. The ability to print from an electronic file was how the airman removed the document to his house.
The contents were opinions of people at the time but then revealed the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of intelligence sources. Those who actually know the real data can gain much from the leak. The leak also can reveal the effectiveness of Russian propaganda in influencing US assessments. Doubtful that the airman even understood how much might be revealed in the leak.
As fodder for the pro/con-Ukraine support forces, the leak has created even more trouble.

The article points to a real problem
Overclassification creates an excessive administrative burden. This makes compliance a huge and pointless task, that is treated with contempt. Same happens in the corporate world..
And then, an actual TopSecret document was hnded to the public
Maybe there should be more classifications, such as
internal (do not publish to external people and do not publish online, but nothing very secret and you can brag about it with your friends)
secret
top secret (with audited logs of who read the document and why)
But then, the egos of so many Pentagon pper pushers would be bruised.

The problem, primarily, is ego….complicated and amplified by Bureaucracy.
The more important I am (must be!) the more Top Secret…Special Top Secret….and of course Dean Wormer’s Double Secret Probation Super Top Secret stuff I generate.
If I am Ultimately Important (so important that you can’t even think about me without getting the CIA involved) then everything I do and say is Super Duper Secret Classified….and no one can see it, not even me.
As a result, THREE things happen — all entirely predictable: 1) everyone stops caring about ‘secret stuff’ because everything is secret stuff meaning nothing is really secret stuff…. and 2) being able to demonstrate that I have access to secret stuff (which most probably is entirely mundane stuff) is the best & fastest way to demonstrate exactly how important/cool I really am. The third thing — the most dangerous thing: actual, real confidential material..material which can significantly impact our national security is dealt with in the same loosey-goosey, amateurish, adolescent manner as everything else because no one really cares until it’s too late.
In such a world, filled with an escalating & vicious mediocrity, what is truly important is easily lost (or easily exposed) as idiots with no real understanding act increasingly like cartoons. We see Young Jack and we expect to find a skateboard tucked beneath his arm…not 10,000 national secrets, casually shared in on-line gaming chat rooms.
Stupid, pathetic, and tragic all at once. You’d like to send him to the principal’s office for losing his homework once too often. Instead, we’ll probably, justly, send him to spend a decade or two in a Federal Pen for endangering the nation. Ridiculous and idiotic, all at once.

The real secrets of the depth of US involvement in Ukraine will never be leaked.

Just like Luttwak to be a breadth of fresh air.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the US used to electrocute spies. Perhaps they should do so again “to encourage the others*”.

(*V.)

I don’t buy the motive in this case. Surely he was part of the lunatic fringe that believes Putin is their friend in the war against the liberal left..