He sent the documents to be filtered by trusted journalists working for one of the worlds number one investigative newspapers. It’s not like he sold them to the Daily Mail

There’s a slight irony in your comment about his performance reviews - how did that get out? Apparently leaking isn’t always a problem :)

That's one way to look at it. Another interpretation would be that he knew about specific things, assumed there were other bad things he hadn't learned about yet, and couldn't filter through it himself.

Why do the agencies not bother to filter out unrelated material? According to you, the responsible course of action would have to be to record only what is related to illegal activity in the first place.

Your talking about legality is a straw-man anyway: the point is mass surveillance being highly unethical. Not even the law reflecting that fact makes the reality of it only worse.

>I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism.

Nice comment under an article that specifically calls out state gaslighting (false claims that portray the whistleblower as a bad/immature/insane person, or discredit them in another way).

Not all of us can grep as well as we'd like.

Besides, swiping only the most telling and highligy classified documents would've aroused suspicion. He might have been including some line noise to distract a system looking for patterns. Also, including unrelated but genuine documents would make his leak easier to verify because it proves he has access to the source.

Just to be clear - if you are trying to amass enough proof to bring to the media, but expect to be fired any day now, the logical thing to do is to exfiltrate as much of what could be relevant and sort out the rest after.

Say you exfiltrate not enough and are fired. You're shit out of luck, and there is no way to infiltrate someone else to your position to get the rest out.

I doubt you can honestly see his actions as reckless or revengeful.

The government is not a person so your rhetorical device is as nonsensical and irrelevant as your unsubstantiated character assassination. Moreover, a criminal organization can make no claims to ‘fairness’. Criminal governments are no different.

And you actually believe those stories? They also tried to claim that Assange was a rapist.