ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Contents of the United States diplomatic cables leak (New Zealand)

Okay, kiddo, have you ever played a game where you whisper something to your friend and they whisper it to their friend and so on, until everyone knows the secret? Well, this was kind of like that, but with important papers.

Some people who worked for the United States government wrote down secret things that they learned while working with other countries, like New Zealand. They put those secret things into cables, which are like messages that are sent from one place to another through the computer.

But then, someone decided to play a trick and leaked those secret cables to the public, which means that they made them public for everyone to read. This was not good, because some of the things in those cables were private, like talking about important people and decisions made by those people.

So basically, the United States diplomatic cables leak for New Zealand was a bunch of secret messages sent from the U.S. government to its diplomats in New Zealand, that got leaked to the public, and that made some people upset because they contained private information.