Any self-respecting leak needs a name. It can be a play on “Papers” (Pentagon, Panama, Pandora) or on the word “Leaks” itself (Swiss, Lux, Football); simply adding “Files” to a proper noun seems to confer an attention-grabbing gravitas. But the recent leak of US intelligence documents about sensitive global affairs doesn’t have a single moniker. The Washington Post and others called them “THE DISCORD LEAKS,” after the social platform where they surfaced. But this hasn’t universally caught on—perhaps because, as the New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac noted, the leaks aren’t about Discord. “It’s like calling something ‘the internet leaks,’” he wrote.
The semantic confusion hasn’t ended there. Mainstream commentators seem to agree that the alleged leaker, a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira, is not a “whistleblower.” The leak seemed too scattershot to advance any unified argument about wrongdoing—and that was before an online acquaintance of Teixeira’s told the Post: “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower.” (Tucker Carlson and others have characterized Teixeira as a whistleblower, even if they haven’t used that word.) There has also been some dispute as to whether the leaker is even a “leaker”—the media critic Dan Froomkin thinks not, on the grounds that “leakers are public-spirited” whereas “thieves just post (or sell) secrets because they can.” At the very least, we have been told, Teixeira has nothing in common...
“Hey #Southafrica, Musk didn't have the decency to shake your president's hand. Musk helped get Malema sentenced. Don't believe for a second he won't target Ramaphosa,” reads the X post published ...