Twitter? Really? Telegram? Not possible. Gamer boards? Come on, man!
We’re just now beginning to understand the extent of extremely sensitive information that was leaked on several social websites including Twitter and a server about Minecraft maps, as well as the Russian social media site Telegram. Incredibly, the classified documents had been circulating on various message boards since at least January.
And the Biden administration didn’t have a clue.
We won’t know the extent of the damage to U.S. intelligence, military, or diplomatic assets for weeks. The provenance of each document must be traced back to where it was first leaked. And given the circuitous route taken by many of the documents, we may never know how some documents made it into the open.
Members of the now-defunct server Discord first noticed information about global topics being posted, including the war in Ukraine, during the winter. Then one user began to post information in written, summary form. That same user began to post images of classified documents sometime in January.
Related: Pentagon Leaks Imply World War III Has Already Begun
Finally, on April 6, the New York Times published a piece about the leaks. And the White House was caught flat-footed.
“No one in the U.S. government knew they were out there,” one U.S. official told Politico. As to why they didn’t: “We cannot answer that just yet,” a senior administration official said. “We would all like to understand how that happened.”
“Federal government agencies do not proactively monitor online forums looking for threat-related activity,” said John Cohen, the former acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. “If a person or entity were to post classified information on one of those forums, there’s a high likelihood that government officials would not detect it.”
We know that’s not entirely accurate. The Feds monitor all kinds of online forums looking for “threat-related activity.” Not just right-wing groups but Islamist groups as well.
But the real problem is that, literally, no one is in charge.
Current and former officials said while each agency is responsible for investigating breaches of intelligence within their own departments, there is no one office that is responsible for monitoring, for example, social media sites for classified leaks.
The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon declined to comment.
The U.S. government — including the Pentagon and agencies in the intelligence community — maintains that it does not spy on Americans, and there’s an argument that monitoring these online forums — even for illegally leaked materials — could be considered just that.
One possible source of the leaked documents, referred to as “OG” by the Washington Post, was a user on an invitation-only clubhouse who told the members that he worked on a military base.
The young member read OG’s message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers. He annotated some of the hand-typed documents, the member said, translating arcane intel-speak for the uninitiated, such as explaining that“NOFORN” meant the information in the document was so sensitive it must not be shared with foreign nationals.
OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.
The story told by the Post of OG’s actions in posting hundreds of photographs of highly classified documents is nearly unbelievable. Apparently, the young man was able to sneak some kind of camera into his workplace to take photos. The fact that he made it out of a secure facility without his treason being detected does not speak well of the military’s security regime.
Not only are U.S. secrets nearly wide open for perusal but no one is in charge of detecting leaks. It’s not a very comforting thought that our secrets can be blasted all over the internet without anyone in the government knowing or doing anything about it.
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