In this photo illustration a Minecraft logo is seen on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by ... [+]
The Pentagon has been trying to figure out how highly classified documents were leaked online, according to new reports from the New York Times and Washington Post. But the websites where these Top Secret military documents were leaked is making the mystery even weirder. That’s because the documents, some of which cover topics like CIA assessments of the war in Ukraine, showed up in an online forum about Minecraft and a space for trash-talking YouTubers.
The New York Times was the first U.S. outlet to report on the existence of the leaked documents on Thursday, which appeared to include military assessments about the war between Russia and Ukraine. At first, it looked like the documents originally appeared on Twitter and Telegram—the latter being a social media site that’s very popular in Russia. But more recent assessments indicate the documents first showed up in much stranger places.
Bellingcat, an open source intelligence research firm, has been tracking the history of the Pentagon’s leaked documents on platforms like 4Chan, an edgy message board popular with racists and mass shooters, and Discord, a site frequented by video game enthusiasts where people can host their own chatrooms, called servers.
At least 10 documents marked Top Secret were posted to a Discord server called Minecraft Earth Maps, according to Bellingcat. Minecraft is a highly popular video game that allows users to build their own worlds, but for some reason a user on Discord decided it was a great place to share incredibly sensitive U.S. intelligence.
“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,” Bellingcat wrote in a new report on Sunday.
But it wasn’t just a random Minecraft forum. As the Washington Post reported on Saturday, a Discord server called WowMao also included over 30 classified documents before the forum was deleted. WowMao is the name of a YouTube channel with over 200,000 subscribers.
And that’s not even the end of it. Bellingcat reports it has spoken with Discord users who insist another server, called Thug Shaker Central, also contained classified documents as early as January 13—at least before it was deleted. The unnamed sources told Bellingcat that Thug Shaker Central was filled with many more classified documents than WowMao, though that claim couldn’t be independently verified.
While the locations of the leaks are odd, the documents are a big deal to the U.S. military and intelligence community. The documents, which were photographed rather than scanned in order to be shared online, include highly sensitive information about how the CIA has recruited human agents and closely held information about how the U.S. tracks Russian forces with satellite imagery, according to the latest reporting from the Washington Post.
The documents are from the rich and varied mix of alphabet soup agencies in the U.S., according to the Post, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
The leaked documents reportedly show the U.S. has intimate knowledge of Russia’s intelligence service, the GRU, but also indicate Ukraine’s military has been suffering from over a year of conflict. But it’s not just sensitive documents about Russia and Ukraine in the leaked files. Intelligence assessments about nuclear plans in Iran and North Korea as well as threat assessments on China are also among the leaked images, according to the New York Times.
The documents were scrubbed from Discord, but I was able to find one of the purported leaked files still available on Twitter as of early Sunday morning. The document included information about U.S. surface ships and submarines in Europe along with a map, as well as other sensitive info.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently responded skeptically to a tweet about the Pentagon trying to delete sensitive documents, perhaps an indication he’s happy to host the leaked documents.
“NEWS: Pentagon is trying to get Twitter to remove posts that contain classified documents about the war in Ukraine,” a Twitter user that Musk follows wrote on April 6.
“Yeah, you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all,” Musk replied sarcastically.
As Bellingcat notes, some people have speculated that the leak is disinformation from the U.S., and American intelligence agencies do have a history of implementing campaigns to confuse geopolitical adversaries. But if an agency like the CIA or NSA is behind this, they’ve done a great job of convincing a lot of national security reporters that U.S. intelligence has been compromised, something that currently makes them look pretty foolish.
Information sharing between traditional allies of the U.S. has reportedly been curtailed following the leak, according to the Washington Post, something that presumably runs the risk of hampering effectiveness in a proxy fight with Russia. But it makes sense that the U.S. would want to figure out the origin of this leak and quickly. Because while policymakers have been feeling pretty good that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the New Cold War adversary as much less of a threat than previously thought, big intelligence leaks can get people killed when cold wars turn hot. And the war in Ukraine is about as hot as it gets without the U.S. and Russia actually shooting at each other.
