If your adversary is a state intelligence agency, you're probably a high ranking politician and a boomer who is clueless about computers, and has demonstrably terrible opsec, either through government incompetence of your own agencies, or not following the terribly cumbersome opsec procedures, either because of inconvenience, the policies being terrible or sheer incompetence.
The amount of examples we've seen of this is staggering.
That sounds like an elected legislator, not like the kind of person with close access to compartmentalized info. And its the form of a leak of policy or some covert program; details which could also be bought; so it’s called “retail” compared with systematic.
I think saying that people like Hillary Clinton, Trump, Biden or Bolton didn't have access to highly sensitive information is not a reasonable stance (and those are just the ones we know about).
It’s good that no one is arguing that. But your argument isn’t strong. You’re saying that numbers matter. Those kinds of people go in and out of SCIFs. If they belch a secret at lunch, maybe it has lobbying implications, but it wasn’t compartmentalized. It can even be disinfo.
The real ROI is to land a Jonathan Pollard. Not even a million Hegseths can leak enough info to collect into one Pollard.
The amount of examples we've seen of this is staggering.