The suspected leak of highly classified Pentagon documents has forced defence officials into the online worlds of gamers, meme lords and their leagues of followers, and exposed an unavoidable weakness in US national security.
Former White House national security analyst and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment think tank Gavin Wilde said this leak was different to those that have most recently rocked US administrations.
The documents were marked as highly classified, so while that limited access to people with a certain level of security clearance, the actual number of people who might have been in that group is reported to be significant. The Washington Post reported the alleged leaker shared several documents a week, beginning late last year, right up until last month.after a select few documents were shared on Russian Telegram channels crawling with journalists trying to understand what Russian groups are doing in Ukraine and looking for original images or information from inside the war.
Bellingcat found evidence that, two days before landing in the Minecraft chat, the cache of documents had been shared to another Discord channel for fans of meme creator wow_mao, and before that, to another thread called Thug Shaker Central.The Washington Post described the original Discord server as an invitation-only clubhouse with about 25 active users, where an elder-like figure known as OG lectured the younger members of the group on global affairs and secretive government operations.
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