Who knew what, and when - is a puzzle to be revealed by the Washington Post, the liberal media that was searching for info and seeed to know things months BEFORE they eventually led the gov’t to the young man with a profile that would make headlines.
- https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1646685240402870273
- https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1646879965365796864
Pentagon leak traced to video game chat group users arguing over war in Ukraine
The Guardian - Alex Hern UK technology editor
EXCERPT:
The bizarre provenance of the leak may seem unusual but it is far from the first time that a dispute between gamers has sparked an intelligence breach, with the overlapping communities causing problems for military and gaming platforms alike.
The existence of the leaked cache was exposed as documents showing estimated casualties in the Bakhmut theatre of battle began circulating on public social networks last week.
. . . a second set of documents, including the edited image, were being passed around pro-Russian Telegram channels.
Neither was the original source, however. Before they emerged on to the public internet, the documents had been shared on closed chatrooms hosted by Discord, a gamer-focused chat app. In one server, called “Minecraft Earth Map”, 10 of the documents were posted as early as 4 March, a month before they appeared on 4chan.
“After a brief spat with another person on the server about Minecraft Maps and the war in Ukraine, one of the Discord users replied: ‘Here, have some leaked documents’ – attaching 10 documents about Ukraine, some of which bore the ‘top secret’ markings,” said Aric Toler, an analyst at the investigative research group Bellingcat.
That user had, in turn, found them on another Discord server, run by and for fans of the Filipino YouTuber WowMao, where 30 documents had been posted three days earlier, with “dozens” of other unverified documents about Ukraine.
However, even that did not appear to be the original source: a third Discord server, named “Thug Shaker Central”, among other titles, may have been where the documents were originally posted as early as mid-January.