I think it's not out of the question it's multiple motives, too. It's not impossible someone chose to grab some stuff due to moral objections, and is feeding the information through some channels that themselves have their own motivations. I've seen accusations that Snowden had that happen to him with his documents, for instance, by which I don't mean that I do or do not believe that, just that it's not inconceivable. You don't necessarily need a single atomic motive for this to be happening.

If so, that raises other interesting questions, such as: "What is the largest, most powerful possible intelligence agency that would not be virtually 100% guaranteed to leak so hard that non-trivial stuff would even get into the open air?" We spend a lot of time on HN worrying about how powerful a police state could become with modern technology, but it's possible that that very power could itself be a quantitative change and that an entity powerful enough to be that strong of a police state might also virtually inevitably tear itself apart with internal struggles. I mean, that would still suck for those not in the middle (though it sucks for them too; one of the reasons I really hate police states is that really nobody is happy, not even the people with power), but it may imply that it is intrinsically less stable of an arrangement than many of us fear.

I'm just musing here for other people to bounce their ideas off of, not particularly proposing a concrete idea here. But is it just me, or in the last 10 years have we not been seeing a slowly ramping rate of outright-public leaks like this? What if it's not a fluke, but a fundamental attribute of the current technology landscape and psychological makeup of humans at scale?