The US national security community is grappling with the fallout from the release of dozens of classified documents, including the impact of sharing classified information within the government and on ties to other countries, two US officials said.
Reuters has reviewed more than 50 of these documents, labeled “secret” and “top secret,” which first surfaced on social media sites in early March and which purportedly reveal details about Ukraine’s military vulnerabilities and information on allies, including Israel, South Korea and Turkey. . The material didn’t get much attention until a New York Times article on Friday.
Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the documents. US officials said some estimates of Ukrainian battlefield casualties appear to have been skewed to underestimate Russian losses.
The leak was so alarming inside the Pentagon that the matter was referred to the Justice Department, which has opened a criminal investigation into the release of the documents.
Two US defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the Pentagon is reviewing procedures on the extent to which some of the most sensitive US secrets are shared.
Some of the documents, one of the officials said, would likely be available to thousands of people with security clearances from the United States and allied governments, despite being highly classified, as the information directly pertains to those countries.
The Pentagon said in a statement Sunday that an interagency effort is assessing the impact the documents could have on the national security of the United States and that of close US allies, a standard procedure known as “damage assessment” for leaks. of confidential information.
The first source said the number of people who accessed the documents underscores that perhaps sensitive information was being shared too much with employees who may not require the level of detail in some documents.
“The Pentagon has had to restrict unfettered access to some of the most sensitive information when they (they have) no justifiable reason to have it,” the first source said.
The two officials further said that while the leaks were very concerning, many of them only provided excerpts from February and March – when they were dated – but didn’t appear to reveal anything about future operations.
While the release of documents appears to be the most serious public leak of classified information in years, officials say it so far falls short of the scale and scope of the 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables that appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2013.
Source: Terra
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