New Details on Intelligence Leak Show It Circulated for Weeks Before Raising Alarm
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • last year • 56 commentsBy: Yaroslav Trofimov, Sharon Weinberger and Robert McMillan (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
One of the most significant leaks of highly classified U.S. documents in recent history began among a small group of posters on a messaging channel that trafficked in memes, jokes and racist talk.
Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about U.S. allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.
The documents, which appear to have numbered in the hundreds, stayed among the members of the tiny group on the Discord messaging platform until early March, when another user reposted several dozen of them to another group with a larger audience. From there, at least 10 files migrated to a much bigger community focused on the Minecraft computer game.
On Wednesday, with the U.S. government apparently still unaware, a Russian propaganda account on Telegram posted a crudely doctored version of one of the documents, alongside a few unedited ones.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department are now on a sprawling hunt for answers on how the dozens of images that purport to show secret documents surfaced online. A government probe, launched Friday at the request of the Defense Department, is searching for the source of the leak.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said Sunday night the department was reviewing and assessing the validity of the photographed documents “that appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material.” She said the U.S. had discussed the matter with allies over the weekend and was weighing the potential national security impact of the breach.
The intelligence leak is shaping up to be one of the most damaging in decades, officials said. The disclosure complicates Ukraine’s spring offensive. It will likely inhibit the readiness of foreign allies to share sensitive information with the U.S. government. And it potentially exposes America’s intelligence sources within Russia and other hostile nations.
A decade after National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked a giant cache of top-secret documents about surveillance and other intelligence activities, the U.S. government is still unable to protect against such breaches.
“How the heck are we back here again?” said Brett Bruen, president of Global Situation Room, a national security consulting firm, and a former White House official in the Obama administration. “These kinds of large scale security breaches were supposed to be a thing of the past. New controls and checks were put in place. Yet, clearly it wasn’t enough and we need a major rethink [and] revision to the classified protection process.”
Who had access
The Wall Street Journal wasn’t able to independently authenticate the documents, but they contain enough detail to give them credibility. Defense officials have said they believe some of the documents could be authentic.
In total, just over 50 documents with Secret and Top Secret classification markings have surfaced so far, and have been viewed by the Journal and a variety of independent intelligence analysts. A critical question is who had access, and when, to the hundreds of others that were posted in the original group between January and March, and how significant are the secrets that these files contain.
The U.S. intelligence community is expected to take measures to protect the sources and methods used in the collection of data in that material. “You have to assume it is compromised,” said Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University. “But assuming that the adversary has it is one thing, knowing it is another.”
The probe into the leak will be among the FBI’s top priorities as investigators search for who had access to the information, and who would have motive to make it public, said Joshua Skule, a former FBI senior executive who is now the president of the government contracting firm Bow Wave.
“They are going to be looking to get to the bottom of who did it as expeditiously as possible, they are going to be sparing no resource,” Mr. Skule said. “The FBI is approaching this as if someone has committed a treasonous act.”
The leaked documents are photographs of presentations and files that had been printed out on A4 paper. They appear to have been folded twice, perhaps to be smuggled out of a secure facility. A variety of items can be seen in the margins of the photos, including Gorilla glue, shoes and instructions for a GlassHawk HD spotting scope, details that could facilitate the search for the leaker.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a Telegram post that it was unlikely that Russia was behind the original intelligence breach.
“If you have an operating channel to obtain intelligence from the Pentagon, you don’t burn it for a one-day publicity drive,” he wrote. By publicizing the leak, he added, Russia aimed to distract attention from Ukraine’s preparations for the offensive, and to “sow certain doubts and mutual suspicions” between Kyiv and its partners.
Mr. Zelensky reacted to the leak by ordering new measures to clamp down on unauthorized disclosures of military information. The U.S. has also changed how military personnel access such documents, defense officials said last week.
The most damaging files, security analysts say, are the roundups of vetted intelligence material compiled in the Central Intelligence Agency’s operations center intelligence update. They include information on conversations that the U.S. had intercepted within allied governments, such as communications of the leaders of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service and discussions among members of South Korea’s national security council on whether to sell ammunition that could end up in Ukraine.
Even more sensitive is the information that appears derived from the U.S. penetration of the Russian government, such as details on how a Russian hacker shared screenshots with the FSB security service on accessing Canada’s natural-gas infrastructure, internal Russian ministry of defense deliberations on supplying ammunition to the Wagner paramilitary group, and plans by Russian military intelligence to foment an anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian campaign in Africa.
Aric Toler, head of research and training at the Bellingcat investigative consortium, which has carried out several probes of Russian intelligence operations, said that he has been in touch with three original members of the Discord group.
The group’s members saw hundreds of classified files before the channel was wiped clean, he said. Most members are based in the U.S. The identity of the original poster remains unknown.
Baffling pattern
Document leaks have emerged as a common tactic during the war in Ukraine, but the posting of the apparent U.S. intelligence files on Discord, an online chat service favored by videogame players, follows a different, somewhat baffling pattern, according to analysts.
Once global attention was drawn to the leak, members of the Discord groups scurried to delete their accounts and to purge their servers, fearing retribution by the U.S. government and unwelcome attention from foreign intelligence agencies.
“I left that server and I really hope that I am safe,” one of the users, who had uploaded some of the leaked files to the Minecraft community, posted on Friday, adding a crying emoji.
Founded eight years ago in San Francisco, Discord first gained popularity as software that gamers could use to talk to each other in a group. The majority of these chat servers are private—shared by friends—but they can be public, too. Discord also hosts communities supporting Ukraine’s cause.
Discord is cooperating with law enforcement on the leak investigation, a Discord spokesman said. “It is Discord’s highest priority to ensure a safe experience for our users,” he said. “As this remains an active investigation, we cannot provide further comment at this time.”
On Sunday, Discord’s website listed more than 20,000 public servers, the majority of them concerning gaming. “It’s a very reliable service when the games are acting glitchy,” said Levi Gundert, chief security officer with the intelligence firm Recorded Future.
Researchers at Mr. Gundert’s firm have also found unsavory content on the platform, such as terrorist propaganda and tools for hackers. “It really looks more like a kind of free-for-all in terms of the content that’s available,” he said.
Discord would likely have information about the users of the original group’s server that would be of use to law enforcement investigators, Mr. Gundert said.
The latest leak isn’t the first time sensitive documents have shown up on a gaming-related server. Last year, a player of the WarThunder military vehicle combat game posted real classified information on the British Challenger 2 tanks, while a year earlier another user posted a classified manual for the French Leclerc tanks.
The new disclosures are far more significant. They include information about the types of heavy weapons and equipment held by the nine Ukrainian brigades that the U.S. and allies are preparing for the coming spring offensive; precise details on the quickly dwindling ammunition of the Ukrainian air defense systems ; the level of protection of critical infrastructure sites; and details on how many tanks, artillery pieces and military aircraft Ukraine operates.
The slide initially publicized on Wednesday and Thursday by Russian propaganda Telegram accounts had been doctored to inflate Ukrainian battlefield casualties and to minimize Russian ones. The crude nature of the alteration suggests this wasn’t a high-level intelligence operation, security analysts said.
Another purported Pentagon document that emerged on Friday contained the same estimate of Ukrainian and Russian battlefield fatalities as the unaltered slide: up to 43,000 Russian troops and up to 17,500 Ukrainian troops, in addition to as many as 41,000 Ukrainian civilians.
Separately from the war, one of the items in the CIA update said that Mossad leaders “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest against the new Israeli government’s proposed judicial reform, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government.” The update cited signals intelligence, an indication that conversations among the Mossad leadership have been intercepted by the U.S. government.
Mossad Sunday took the rare step of publicly denying the report, calling these allegations “mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever.”
Changes in security
U.S. national security entities have taken steps to prevent a repeat of the 2013 breach, when Mr. Snowden, then a contractor to the National Security Agency, left the country with a large number of classified documents, and provided them to journalists.
Mr. Snowden, who became a Russian citizen, has said his leak was meant to shine light on what he described as abuses of U.S. surveillance, and chose to provide them to journalists so that they would vet the documents.
There has been no explanation so far of the motives behind the latest leak.
In the current case, the U.S. is considering a range of possibilities over how it occurred, including that someone with a top-secret security clearance leaked the information or that U.S. intelligence systems were hacked, U.S. officials said Saturday.
Leak probes usually begin by determining who had access to the documents, current and former officials said. Potentially hundreds of government employees have security clearances that would give them the ability to view the documents.
Marc Raimondi, a former Justice Department official, said that the pool of people who have access to some of the highest levels of classified information expanded in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A congressional commission that investigated the attacks pointed to the lack of intelligence sharing as one of the reasons the U.S. government didn’t uncover the plot.
Since then, efforts have focused on sharing intelligence more widely, “but with having that wider pool of people having access, obviously, you run the risk that one of those people may not take their oath as seriously as they should, and you have an improper release of national defense information,” said Mr. Raimondi, chief of staff at the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington, D.C., based think tank focused on security and trade issues.
Mr. Raimondi said sharing intelligence remains critical for protecting the U.S. and its allies, even if it comes with risks.
“An extraordinarily small number of clearance holders violate their obligation,” he said. “But when it does occur, it can be devastating.”
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Just another example of how lackadaisical our intelligence services/Defense department have become. Remember they shot down a spy balloon only after people saw it and they lied about the information the balloon sent back to China. This is what the end of a once great world power looks like.
Absolutely amazing that as soon as the Biden crew took office - wow - look at all the classified leaks coming outta Biden's crews offices.
At least Trump kept the materials at his residence. Biden, it appears, just fans the flames and adds more fodder - all with impunity.
They are far too busy tracking down Jan 6th rioters for Garland to charge with "parading". Didn't you hear; they have found another 1,200 to charge!
That is all that matters.
They can be bothered to do their damn jobs protecting classified documents (unless it is tied to Trump).
Notice the silence coming from Tennessee about tracking down rioters?
... shouldn't be too difficult for the christo-fascist klan to find them, it's a school day...
But they won't. They were backed by Democrats. We've all see how that ends.
yeah, goobers showing up at the local high school with AR's wouldn't be the best optics now... /s
Doesn't he just knock us out.
After January 6th MAGA blamed it on ANTIFA and BLM yet 100% of those charged are MAGA!
Really? Ignoring those BLM (BLM claims they were cast out- after the fact of course) that help break into the Capitol Building? Sullivan faces 8 charges. No way in hell is he MAGA.
.
Also, WTF does that have to do with my comment?
I am sure tracking down every last Jan 6th rioter is far more important than protecting classified information- and tracking down moles and spies.
Is there anything the left will make this administration take responsibility for?
why are you always so angry?
Not a freaking thing.
Does the pot meet the kettle?
Who within our government would do this?
My bet is on the Pro-Putin MAGA Leftovers...
Because, this hurts Biden and helps Russia.
Also note: It is Trumpsters making hay of it!
Also note the leftists trying to sweep it under the carpet.
I only see Democrats demanding answers!
As the gop makes unfounded accusations.
Trust this Democrat to take down names...
Those who did it will be found and charged!
Biden's ass kissing supporters should be unhappy about these leaks too.
Why aren't you?
Then you would have no problem backing that up.
Whoever did it was risking serious prison time.
That's false. Is that what Fox News is saying?
Everyone is mad about it, and want answers.
So far only Putin, and Trump, gain from this...
It is the Democrats now demanding answers!
The DoD and agencies involved are demanding answers and the Dept of Justice will conduct an investigation. Congress is in recess.
Democrats are to busy servicing Putin to demand answers. This is 100% on Biden and his band of fuck-ups
Bullshit! This illegal release of classified intelligence information is harmful to America and the Biden administration is determined to identify and to punish all of those responsible.
Democrats are Putin sycophants, that’s why XI is partnering with Putin. They are actively supporting those regimes. They have a history of communist love, plus the have their racism in common, Russia, China and democrats share a long history of racism.
Sure they are.
Just like they are busy tracking down every last Summer of Love rioter that assaulted federal officers; and destroyed federal property.
Just like they have found out who leaked the abortion ruling.
The most harmful thing to America is Brandon the Human Fuck Up Machine and Democrats!
Even here on Newstalkers there is a small group of commenters that were consistently anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia in regards to the Ukraine war. Not a single one of them could be considered a liberal or a democrat.
Yes, that's true and we know who they are.
So, who is on this mythical list?
What Democrats support Putin in Ukraine?
Not so much support, but AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley Jamie Raskin and Rashida Tlaib along with other progressives signed a letter to the WH urging Joe Biden to engage in direct talks with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
So you feel that any effort to end the war is pro-Putin? Please do explain your thought process to connect the 2.
What confused you with my comment:
English words?
Some other words that can confuse folks here include:
Without a single doubt on that!!
LOL!
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Exactly, you should feel very flattered.
Don't be too sure about that. Think about what this is distracting everybody from - Biden's illegal possession of classified documents for 6 years, Biden's crackhead kids illegal possession of a firearm and his computer, the list goes on and on.
It is so stupid to even THINK that somehow Trump gains something from this fiasco.
And Biden had some of those documents since his Senate days, so a little longer than just 6 years.
Of course, it must have been the former 'president' who is the leaker. He never shuts the fuck up.
The ineptness of the entire Biden Administration on full display.
What is rather odd is that absolutely no one seems the least bit surprised that leaks came while Biden and his handlers run things.
TBF we don't know enough yet.
For all we know this could all get traced back to a guy hired under Trump, Obama or even GWB.
This could be anything from gross incompetence in the Biden DoD to a Trump supporter intentionally trying to undermine the Biden Admin to an SJW enacting some sort of scorched earth campaign to a teenage kid who stole a briefcase on the DC Metro. The possibilities are myriad.
This didn't happen under Trump, Obama or GWB. It happened under Biden. This is all on his dumpster fire administration.
And if it turns out to be so, you will suddenly hear complete silence about it until they figure out a spin to declare the leaker a true patriot.
And if it turns out to be someone Democrats love, then you will hear the same from the present inept Administration.
I don't know why old Joe doesn't threaten to give whoever leaked it the old Corn Pop treatment.
I'm sorry that's nonsense.
If an employee hired under Obama wanted to have a tantrum because Trump was elected and decided to leak documents, you would not be blaming Trump for failure to re-vet every federal employee with security clearance.
The fact is none of us know shit about this yet.
I can't believe you've run out of legitimate proven reasons to bitch about Biden yet, so give this a week or so to finish baking and we'll see what actually happens.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest we're not short of hyper-partisan morons on both sides of any discussion.
So yeah, there will be some who attempt to rationalize that if it turns out to be the case, just like there are some attempting to rationalize illegal protests or pretty much anything AOC says.
I'm sorry was there a special election held to bring Obama, Trump or GWB back into office to play scape goat for the incompetence of the Biden administration? No? So this falls all on Biden. This and a laundry list of other fuck ups that have happened since January 20, 2021.
They exist on both sides of the aisle, but the right side has them in far far greater numbers.
Undermining your own statement there as you make it. How nice.
Not everything that happens is the president's fault, no matter who he is.
It's like this is some sort of "Biden Derangement Syndrome". It's not good when liberals do it over Trump, and it's not good here, either.
As you say, there is a laundry list of real, proven shit that Biden is responsible for. You have zero idea whether this goes on that list or not.
How so?
Funny how that only applies to Democrat skid marks. Just stop for supporting the clusterfuck.
It doesn't.
I'm not buying this "if you don't condemn him 24/7 that's the same as supporting him" bullshit like people have been doing about Trump for the last 6 years.
Seriously dude. It's OK to let the looney lefties monopolize that particular variety of stupid.