The Guardian view on the Pentagon leaks: this system puts lives at risk | Editorial

There must always be a place for necessary whistleblowing from inside governments. This newspaper will always stand, responsibly, for that principle. Yet leaks are also serious matters, which challenge a state. In a particularly serious case, or at a particularly serious time, such as during a war, a leak can help an enemy, dismay allies, weaken morale and, at least potentially, change the military balance and put lives at risk.

Instead, the evidence points in a recognisably more contemporary and disturbing direction. The leaks were made on the social network Discord by a young male official in the Massachusetts air national guard. In the histories of espionage, and also of recent mass shootings, there have been examples of relatively anonymous young men triggering major incidents in part to boost their self-esteem. Jack Teixeira, who was arrested and charged in Boston this week, is 21, and is interested in guns, games and racist memes. He released his Pentagon documents, it has been suggested, to display his self-importance and to impress others in the online gaming chat group of which he was the leading figure.

Two large public policy questions immediately arise. One is how someone low down the intelligence food chain like Teixeira could get his hands on such material. Part of the answer is the unmanageable volume of material held by the US government. For decades, there have been allegations that intelligence agencies were too bloated, slow and complex to be clear, including to themselves, about what must be secret and who should be able to access it. The digital revolution made this process even more mountainous. But, as events from WikiLeaks to these Pentagon leaks suggest, the government systems have not been fit for purpose.