Screenshot of video ‘Collateral Murder’ released on April 5, 2010 and published by Wikileaks showing US troops killing Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. Fair use.

On October 18, 2024, a Telegram channel released a leak attributed to a US intelligence source. The documents — whose authenticity was not contested by intelligence sources — brought to light heavy preparations by Israel to strike Iran. Back then, Israel was expected to strike Iran in retaliation for Iran’s strike on Israel on October 1, which itself was a retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil in July 2024. While I won’t extend the timeline further back, it remains a constant that Israel is the perpetrator throughout.

In its pursuit of military dominance in the region, Israel is resolute in preventing Iran, or other countries, from advancing military capabilities. In order for Israel to persevere (as an idea and as a nation-state), it needs to force its neighbors into submission.

Only a couple of pages long, the leak was dutifully ignored by headlines. As a result, the story garnered no public attention, with only some articles decrying the press’s silence on the matter.

The leaked documents expose US efforts to determine the shape of Israel’s military preparations against Iran through various indicators, mainly articulated through analysis of satellite imagery as well as signals intelligence. There’s a lot to speculate from the contents of these leaks — while the US spoils Israel with unconditional military support, it perhaps also acts as its helicopter parent.

The leaks revealed Israeli forces had undertaken significant military preparations, ranging from air-to-surface ballistic missile exercises to covert long-range drone surveillance operations over Iran and the broader region. Notably, the documents disclose for the first time the existence of the RA-01 stealth drone, which is capable of extended covert operations, surveillance and combat. This is a previously unknown asset in Israel’s arsenal. The leaks also detail the dispersal of missiles and aircraft across various bases, suggesting defense posturing.

The authors of the leaked document caution: “We cannot definitively predict the scale and scope of a strike on Iran, and such a strike can occur with no further GEOINT [Geographical Intelligence] warning,” further noting: “…we have not observed indications that Israel intends to use a nuclear weapon,” while referencing the Jericho II medium-range ballistic missile among the nuclear-capable arsenal.

Mainstream media outlets simply covered the fact that there was a leak (forgoing its contents) and eventually uncovered the identity of the alleged whistleblower.

Those who did cover the story overlooked key points. First, even if it green-lights and actively funds its killing apparatus, the US practices surveillance on Israel (and vice versa; or in Ted Cruz’s words: “Friends and allies spy on each other”). Second, the US relies on Israel for some of its intelligence on Israel (it bears repeating). The documents also included an admission from the US: by ascertaining that Israel did not intend to use a nuclear weapon, it admitted that Israel possesses nuclear weapons in its arsenal. In fact, the leak left us with more questions than answers: why was Israel running multiple covert UAV operations over Iran (and the wider region)? Why did the Israeli air force place concealment screens over six F-15Is aircraft shelters? And why did the leak deem it possible that Israel was practicing air-to-air refueling and combat search and rescue operations “with a large number of aircrafts”?

Israel did eventually strike Iran on October 26, 2024. The leak allegedly delayed the attack, as per Israeli officials, an attack that targeted multiple locations across Iran with air-to-surface missiles shot from possibly over 100 aircraft in an operation it dubbed Operation Days of Repentance. But did the leaks accurately forecast Israel’s October 2024 strikes, or were they indicative of broader strategic preparations?

The alleged CIA leaker, Asif Rahman, was sentenced to three years in prison on June 11, 2025 (37 months to be exact). On June 13, just two days later, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, practically declaring war on Iran. At the time of writing, Israel’s strikes on Iran have killed over 639 people, the majority of whom are civilians, against the backdrop of US President Donald Trump ordering the people of Tehran to evacuate the capital. The US has effectively joined this war following its strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites on the morning of June 22. And today, we are left to ponder whether diligent reporting on the details of this leak would have changed the course of today's events, and how we understand and interpret them.

Many attributed the decision not to publish these leaks to the chilling effect as a result of Julian Assange pleading guilty to the Espionage Act (read: pleading guilty to practicing journalism), which allowed for his release from Belmarsh prison and return home to Australia in July 2024. While the chilling effect on national security topics was almost immediate, we must also recognize that this problem predates Assange’s release: leaks are often viewed, by both press and public, as subject rather than source. In other words, the limelight tends to focus on the act of leaking and the whistleblower, and less so on the substance of the leak itself.

Rahman’s alleged leak and what it perhaps tried to do closely resembles another one, only 20 years earlier. In 2003, Katharine Gun was working as a linguist and translator for the GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence and cybersecurity agency, when she and her colleagues received an email from the US’s National Security Agency (NSA). The email sought the British intelligence agency’s assistance in surveilling the UN offices of six nations that could potentially swing their vote at the Security Council in favor of the US and UK’s invasion of Iraq.

This, too, was a short leak, comprising just one email. This one, like the one from October 2024, came just before a significant escalation, or a declaration of war.

Gun chose to leak the email to The Observer, which kept postponing its publication because of its earlier pro-Blair-Bush stance. Although they eventually published it, it was too late: the US-British axis had already made up its mind in total confidence of its impunity. The US invaded Iraq because it claimed that the then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” and because the US wanted to “free the Iraqi people.”

The leak sought to reveal to the public how the West was attempting to manufacture consent for war, to legitimize the ensuing bloodshed. Now, over 20 years later, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, a nation turned on its head and indefinitely fractured, we are left to wonder: would thorough and early reporting on the contents of the leak have prevented this?

Because leaks do play, for the most part, a preventative role: they are here to inform us of an impending danger, and compel immediate action. But journalists have grown timid.

Even leaks that come in response to an event, during or after a war, hold a preventative element: they represent a plea not to repeat the same cycles of killing, to unseat those in power who keep churning the wheels of death and destruction. Often they’re from military personnel serving within an army, coming to the realization that they must be doing something terribly wrong; that killing that many people — indiscriminately — is probably, definitely, indefensible. That there is never a justification for occupation. That this should not happen in the future, ever again.

Excerpt from Daniel Hale’s handwritten letter to US District Judge Liam O'Grady

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. That is what Chelsea Manning leaked, and that was what she was put behind bars for.

“Once you come to realize that the coordinates in these records represent real places, that the dates are our recent history and that the numbers represent actual human lives — with all of the love, hope, dreams, hate, fear and nightmares with which we all live — then you cannot help but be reminded just how important it is for us to understand and, hopefully, prevent such tragedies in the future.” wrote Manning in a 2015 op-ed in The Guardian.

Yet, nothing was prevented, as was proven by Daniel Hale’s drone leaks a few years later. We learned through Hale how drone warfare normalized mass killing, how assigning a soldier to operate a killer drone from thousands of miles away increases the psychological distance between killer and “target,” and how this distance translates into soldiers detaching from the sin of killing.

We learn through these leaks who truly holds the weapons of mass destruction.

In a nod to the downing of military planes, Hale named his cat Leila, after Leila Khaled, the Palestinian revolutionary known as the first woman to have hijacked an airplane.

Palestine, where nothing was prevented, and nothing is being prevented.

Nothing is being prevented because Jeffrey Goldberg saw himself out of that Signal group chat. Because the headline read “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” rather than “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Its War Crimes.”

Nothing was prevented because on April 17, 2025, less than a month after the Signal leaks, US Forces struck Ras Al Isa Port in Yemen, killing at least 84 civilians, a strike that rights watchdogs are calling to be investigated as a war crime. Because on April 28, just 11 days later, a US airstrike hit a detention center for African migrants in Yemen, killing 68 people of different African nationalities.

These leaks should have shocked public conscience; they should have compelled those funding the killing (either directly or indirectly) to reckon with their moral injuries. These leaks are insisting that people are treated as the subject and not mere cannon fodder. To name who is being killed, and who is doing the killing, to discern between oppressor and oppressed, colonized and colonizer, is what should center private and public conversations.

​​I happen to come from a region that is permanently on the receiving end of US bombs. I also happen to work in this space that is often dubbed as the “intersection of rights and technology,” training journalists on how to protect sources, and sources on how to leak securely. Today, I struggle to form a convincing argument as to why I work in this space or what keeps me in it. What use is it for sources to leak securely if journalists refuse to publish on time or at all? What good does it do when the average reaction to the Signalgate story was humor and gloating over the “rival” administration, or the fact that it was dubbed Signalgate to begin with?

I do know what first motivated me to join this space; in my childlike imagination, I believed that if I were to be part of groups that are building the most resilient (tangible or intangible) infrastructure against surveillance — used by the most daring of whistleblowers — then I could be part of something that is working towards abolishing the systems crushing our livelihoods. Naively, in my latest cover letter, I wrote that encryption “equips us with essential infrastructure to combat global injustice and corruption.”

But I grew up fast; disillusionment beat me to the finish line. We pat ourselves on the back and tell each other we’re doing a good job, but everyone in this field is collectively missing the point, and thus collectively enabling harm.