If I had a dollar for the amount of secrets committed to public repositories I could probably retire. No, that isn’t an excuse. Pretending the US govt isn’t made up of people just like you or I is quite silly.
You'd be rich if you got a dollar for every worldwide murder too, but that doesn't make murder a common workplace occurrence.
In public data (source code on GitHub, etc.) you can expect a prevalence somewhere in the range of 0.5-2.5 live secrets per gigabyte of content. Now yes, there are more than 8 billion people on earth now and the murder prevalence is a lot higher than 0.5-2.5 per billion. But there are _far_ more bytes of public content than there are people on earth, so in absolute terms, there are far more leaked secrets than murders.
If you look at other types of data (like internal Git forges), the prevalence is much higher.
I think you could indeed retire with $1 per leaked secret!
This makes it seem more intentional to me. Regardless of what the ultimate purpose were use of the repository was it says to me, the person knew what they were doing and it wasn’t just an innocent oversight like anybody could’ve made.
The nuance here: when I’ve slipped and committed secrets, it’s typically a relative nothing burger: most common case is API keys to some third-party service. I’ve worked across a bunch of regulated industries and, within those, not caused a breach—because being in that space you know to be more careful, and because the companies in those spaces (wisely!) tend to support good security practices, more so than the industry average.