Dossiers
Pieces that span agencies or countries — single operations told in depth, scandals reconstructed from primary documents, thematic surveys.
Disclosures & whistleblowers
Disclosure cases sit at the intersection of intelligence collection and the law that governs how secrets become public. The Manning–WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 — the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the State Department cables, the Collateral Murder video — made WikiLeaks an institutional fact of US national-security journalism and culminated in Chelsea Manning's court-martial conviction. Vault 7 covers the 2017 leak of the CIA's offensive cyber arsenal and the subsequent prosecution of Joshua Schulte. The Snowden disclosures from 2013 are the largest-scale leak in the public record and the basis for most subsequent legal scholarship on Section 702 and Section 215. The Sednaya / Caesar Files dossier documents a different category — internal photographs of mass deaths in Syrian regime detention, smuggled out by a defector working as a forensic photographer for the Military Police.
Vault 7
The 2017 series of WikiLeaks publications of approximately 8,761 documents and files describing the cyber-tools and operational tradecraft of the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence — sourced by former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte, who was convicted in 2022 by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and sentenced in February 2024 to forty years' imprisonment.
Sednaya and the Caesar Files
The Syrian Military Intelligence detention facility at Sednaya — and the body of approximately 53,000 photographs of detainees who died in regime custody, smuggled out of Syria in 2013 by a defector working as a forensic photographer.
The Snowden Disclosures
The June 2013 disclosures by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of the largest body of classified material on contemporary signals-intelligence operations in any single disclosure of the post-Cold War period.
The Manning–WikiLeaks Disclosures, 2010
The 2010 series of four publication events by WikiLeaks of classified United States military and diplomatic material sourced by US Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning — the *Collateral Murder* video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and the Cablegate State Department cables — together constituting the largest single unauthorised disclosure of classified United States Government records on record at the date of the publications.
How dossiers differ from agency pages
An agency page sits in one country and covers one service — its history, statutory basis, role, and the public record of its operations. A dossier crosses those boundaries. A dossier picks up an operation, a scandal, or a thematic question and follows it across whichever services and states are implicated, footnoted to primary documents and the most defensible secondary record.
The Salisbury attack is a dossier rather than an agency entry because it implicates the GRU, MI5, the SIS, the Metropolitan Police, the OPCW, and the parallel Czech investigation into Vrbětice — no single agency page can carry it. The Snowden disclosures are a dossier because they involve the NSA, GCHQ, CSE, ASD, GCSB, the partner services that received the product, the journalism that processed the archive, and the long arc of post-disclosure legal and policy change. MKULTRA is a dossier because the operation was institutional in a way that has now been substantially documented by the Senate, the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and successive declassifications.
Coverage here is editorial: dossiers are written when there is a coherent public-record account that can be reconstructed at depth. The list grows as new dossiers are written and as additional declassifications expand what can responsibly be said about cases that remain partly closed.