New batch of secret US documents regarding Ukraine, Middle East and China has been discovered in social networks, - Mass media
A new batch of secret documents has appeared on social networks, which probably detail American national security secrets regarding Ukraine, the Middle East, and China.
As Censor.NET informs with reference to UP, The New York Times reports about it.
The newspaper writes that a new leak of classified information has worried the US Department of Defense and added to the uneasiness of a situation that seems to have caught Joe Biden's administration off guard.
Analysts said that more than 100 documents could have gotten into the Internet. US officials said that the scale of the leak and the sensitivity of the documents themselves could cause enormous damage.
A high-ranking representative of American intelligence called the leak "a nightmare for the Five Eyes group," referring to the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which actively share intelligence information, the NYT writes.
The new documents were said to have been found on Twitter and other sites on April 7, a day after the Biden administration said it was investigating a potential leak of classified Ukrainian military plans.
According to the newspaper, one of the slides, dated February 23, is marked "Secret/NoForn", which means that it is not intended for transfer to other countries.
Former senior Pentagon official Mick Mulroy said the leak of classified documents is a "significant security hole" that could hamper Ukrainian military planning.
"Since mostly photos of the documents were published, it appears that this was a deliberate leak by someone who wanted to harm the efforts of Ukraine, the US, and NATO," he said.
At the same time, he called the published documents "the tip of the iceberg."
"While representatives of the Pentagon and national security agencies were investigating the source of the documents that appeared on Twitter and Telegram, another appeared on 4chan, an anonymous message board.
This is a map that allegedly shows the state of war in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. But this leak of documents seems to go far beyond the boundaries of secret materials regarding Ukraine's military plans," the newspaper writes.
Security experts who have reviewed the documents leaked on social media say the batch of documents also includes classified slides on China, the Indo-Pacific theater of operations, the Middle East, and terrorism.
Behind closed doors, NYT reports, national security officials are trying to find the culprit. One official said the documents likely did not come from the Ukrainian side because it did not have access to specific plans marked by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff offices. A second official said that it would be possible to determine how the documents were leaked after it was determined which officials had access to them.
Arik Toler, an analyst at the Dutch investigative website Bellingcat, reported that the first part of the documents was published in early March on Discord, a social media chat platform popular among video game fans, the publication writes.
The commander of the battalion of the National Guard of Ukraine, lieutenant colonel Yurii Bereza, believes that such news about the leak of information should not be paid attention to. He noted that the information war is so intense that "we can no longer determine where the truth is and where lies," adds the NYT.
