It became known who could arrange leak of secret documents: 20-year-old employee of military base, lover of weapons and online games, - WP
Secret documents were able to get on the Internet thanks to a twenty-year-old employee of the American military base, who shared them with a small group of his friends - lovers of weapons and online games.
This is stated in the publication of The Washington Post, Censor.NET reports.
The publication spoke on condition of anonymity with a minor member of the closed Internet group in which the documents were first published. This is a group of about 25 "men and boys" from all over the world - the USA, Europe, Asia, and Latin American countries. Half of them are citizens of the United States, the rest are foreigners.
The group was created in 2020 on the online platform Discord. Its members are united by a love for weapons, military equipment, and Christianity. Members of the group supported each other during the pandemic, discussed weapons and online games.
Last year, one of the group's users with the nickname OG started posting classified documents there. He said he had brought them from work at a military base, and boasted that he knew "the secrets that the government hides from ordinary people." OG urged members of the group not to pass on the information he released.
At first, OG copied the contents of the documents by hand, then began to photograph them. It was about "hundreds of photos" of documents covering a wide range of issues - about the movement of top politicians, the location of troops, an analyst about the geopolitical situation, about attempts by other countries to interfere in the elections.
OG has been uploading documents to the server all winter. On February 28, another teenage user began posting these documents on another Discord server linked to YouTube user "wow_mao". On March 4, several dozen documents appeared on a third Discord server under the name "Minecraft Earth Map". The leak was unstoppable.
A teenager with whom WP spoke said that OG was in a "frenzy state" due to the leak. He stopped publishing new papers, was upset and confused, and was about to "disappear". OG urged associates from his first closed group to "keep quiet and delete any information that may relate to him."
The Discord platform said it would cooperate with US authorities as part of an investigation into the leak and declined to comment further.
It will be recalled that the military documents, which describe in detail the secret plans of the US and NATO to build up the Ukrainian army before the planned offensive against Russia, were published on Telegram and Twitter at the beginning of April.
Later, a new portion of classified documents appeared on social networks, which probably detail American national security secrets regarding Ukraine, the Middle East, and China.
The US Department of Justice has started an investigation into the leak of a huge number of US intelligence documents.
According to Reuters, classified information about US and NATO plans to strengthen the AFU before a counteroffensive "leaked" on the network may be a fake. In turn, as Politico writes, the leak of secret documents led to a crisis in relations between the United States and its allies.
Due to the leak of secret Pentagon documents, Ukraine has already changed some of its military plans.
The Ministry of Defense of Great Britain stressed that the published documents contain significant inaccuracies, so "readers should be careful and not take at face value statements that could potentially spread misinformation."
