[tobyhill]

This leaker appears to be a current or former Air Marshal but just being a part of a program doesn't make him an expert on the underlying ops.
It seems he/she gave CNN some opinion about how he thought things should be and threw in some numbers without substantiating facts backing them up.
Just talking to the MSM about Government Ops without authorization is a violation of the law in itself and I hope he/she goes down.
He/She wants to claim Freedom of Speech but he/she didn't just stop at informing congress about their perception but they put it in bulk e-mail.

[untrained skeptic]

In my opinion an Air Marshal shouldn't be talking to the media about their job. The one exception might be if there was a severe need for someone to blow the whistle on something that the government is doing very, very wrong, and even that should be handled internally to the government if at all possible. Such an Air Marshal should be able to find a sympathetic Congressman that could call for an investigation if it were warranted.

If the Air Marshal wants to have their opinions heard on issues related to their work, they can come up with a statement and ask for it to be verified not to contain confidential information. The lose their ability to criticize their superiors autonomously, but anonymous criticisms of superiors are rarely of much value anyway. It such a person needs to blow the whistle on something, there are ways to do so internally.

The other option the agent has, which is still somewhat risky is to provide vague overall opinions and refer the reporter to the TSA for any details they might want.

For example, the agent could complain that he didn't feel that there were enough agents on flights to be as effective as they should be. It's a vague opinion, it has some value because of who is expressing it, but it gives away pretty much nothing. The reporter has to go to an official source to get the solid details that the agent is not permitted to divulge.

If they find out who leaked the information now, they may have trouble making a criminal case against the agent, but the agent will lose their security clearance. No clearance, no job as an Air Marshal.