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The Recent Pentagon Leak is as Much a Generational Story as it is a National Security Breach

Archive, Security and Resiliency / by

The recent AI Open Letter was both an opportunity to discuss the risk attached to the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 as characterized by the letter and introduce the OODA Loop readership to the work of Tristan Harris – a signatory to the letter – and the work of the Center for Humane Technology.

Harris is one of a new generation of digital ethicists and critics of the unintended consequences of social media and emerging technologies like AI.  As is our media reality at this point, that open letter on AI and the saturation of coverage it garnered feels like months ago.

The recent Pentagon leak has now commandeered the news cycle This leak story now allows for the introduction on OODA Loop of the work of Vice and their “all things cyber” division, Motherboard (“Tech by Vice”), and the podcast Cyber – which are news outlets which represent the best of a new generation of journalists dedicated to a really insightful coverage of global hacking culture, cybersecurity, major cyber incidents and the geopolitical role of emerging technologies.

The tick-tock of the mainstream media coverage of the leaks (from the major American newspapers) is as follows:

As we understand it, Motherboard’s Matthew Gault broke the Minecraft Discord server element of the story – and all subsequent scoops that the NYT, WSJ and WP have leveraged into their coverage since April 7th.  Gault and his colleagues at Vice simply have more innate institutional knowledge, hacker community connections, and a breadth of previous coverage of the world of gaming and hacking represented by this leak than the traditional media outlets are able to muster.   

This leak story is not only generational in terms of the platforms on which the leaks were initially posted, the age cohort of the suspect, and the online discussion group participants who received the initial leaked documents – but a story about the new generation of reporters who are putting in the shoe leather to really understand the story.  I am 52, a member of Gen X and I will just say it:  these great young journalists are super sharp, love what they do, know the world they cover inside and out and, as a result, know their stuff. 

There is also the generational difference of the new climate in open-source intelligence represented by the role of Bellingcat in this story.  That OSINT outlet is more of a mix of seasoned vets and young journalists with deep technical skills, so we chose to highlight Motherboard’s reportage of the Bellingcat scoops as a framing device in this post. 

In the interest of time, all the referenced articles and quote pulls below are written by Gault over at Vice Motherboard, with Cyber’s Ben Makuch pitching in on some of the more recent coverage.  

April 7, 2023, 12:29 pm – Pentagon’s Ukraine War Plans Leaked on Minecraft Discord Before Telegram and Twitter (vice.com)

The earliest version of the leaked Pentagon documents online seem to come from a small gaming community forum.

Classified documents detailing NATO and America’s plans to support Ukraine in repelling Russia’s invasion leaked online, spurring an investigation by the Pentagon. We still don’t know how the documents leaked to Twitter and Telegram, but they first appeared online on 4chan and, before that, a gaming discussion group.

There are two different versions of the leaked documents floating around online, and one appears to have been altered to downplay the number of Russians killed while increasing the number of Ukrainian casualties. The original casualty assessment puts the numbers of Russian losses at around 35,000 while the altered document showed claims Moscow has only lost 16,000 soldiers.

 

According to Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, an early version of the leak appeared on 4chan on April 5. This leak contained three documents and isn’t the original source. Toler told Motherboard he found a version of the leak on an “Minecraft Discord server” that predates what’s on 4chan. The version the gaming discussion group contained 10 images, including maps Kharkiv and Kherson as well as an additional page detailing equipment that Toler hasn’t seen elsewhere. Motherboard confirmed the leak by looking at the Discord server.

In the 4chan leak, the poster appears to be sharing printed out copies of physical documents that have creases and folds in them. In 2017, NSA translator Reality Winner leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election by printing out pieces of paper and walking them out of a secured space. The government was able to identify Winner as the origin of the leak by figuring out that she had printed the documents.

The White House has said it’s working on deleting social media posts that show the leak, but as of this writing there are multiple pictures of the documents on Telegram, Twitter, and other social media sites. 

“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,” Elon Musk said on Twitter in response to a news story about the Pentagon attempting to remove the images from the internet.

This isn’t the first time military secrets have leaked onto a gaming forum. The online military simulation game War Thunder has been the source of several leaks of classified military intelligence, though these leaks pertained to specific military equipment players of those games are interested in, not information about an active war.. 

The fact that military secrets have landed on the internet via a gaming forum and 4chan is funny but also incredibly dangerous. The stakes in Ukraine are literally life and death. Remember that, according to the leak, tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died. (1)

April 10, 2023, 1:37 pm – Leaked Classified Documents Also Include Roleplaying Game Character Stats (vice.com)

An early upload of the leaked Pentagon documents contained a character sheet, but what game was it from? And what can the stats tell us about the person who made it? Motherboard investigates.

Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game.

No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server.

At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon’s strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It’s written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page.

The character’s name is Doctor “Izmer Trotzky,” his character class is “Professor Scientist.” They’ve got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He’s carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer.

The RPG sheet is a curious artifact. We don’t know whether the file was uploaded as a mistake, a joke, or some sort of Easter Egg, and there’s no evidence that the person who made the character sheet had anything to do with leaking the files. It could have been mixed in at any time but was included in one of the zip files that was most popularly being shared on Discord. At some point, someone included this character sheet alongside pictures of Ukrainian troop placements near the city of Bakhmut. 

All of the images reviewed by Motherboard have had their metadata stripped out, including the photograph of the character sheet. Social media sites, including Discord, commonly strip some portion of metadata from photos when they’re uploaded. The character sheet’s filename is out of sequence with the other files in the zip drive. Classified documents in this dump are titled IMG_1328.jpg, IMG_1329.jpg, etc. The character sheet has the filename IMG_9695.jpg. It is also photographed against a white background. The other documents are photographed on a table where a package of Gorilla Glue and documentation about a “scope” can also be seen. (2)

April 11, 2023, 10:58 am – Leaked Pentagon Docs Show Russia’s Brutal Wagner Mercenaries Have Ambitions in Haiti (vice.com)

by B. Makuch

The top-secret documents show Vladimir Putin’s favorite mercenary group has global plans well beyond fighting in Ukraine.

The leaked Pentagon documents that have become an intelligence nightmare for the U.S. government after circulating in, among other places, a Minecraft forum also shed light on the growing global ambitions of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit working hand in hand with the Kremlin.

Led by an apparently villainous chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin—a catering and business oligarch closely allied to President Vladimir Putin—Wagner has emerged from the war in Ukraine as one of the most talked about features of the Russian offensive for its brutality. Prigozhin’s troops, composed of convicts and other volunteers linked to war crimes, have been key to the siege of Bakhmut—a meat-grinding battle in Donbas between mostly Wagner fighters and Ukrainian forces. Though at least under partial control of the Kremlin, Wagner has acted as a semi-autonomous military force inside Ukraine and around the world, which allows for the export of Putin’s most cynical geopolitical ambitions while giving him the veneer of plausible deniability. 

But the leaked top-secret Department of Defense documents, some potentially tampered with but the veracity of which has led to a DOJ criminal investigation, have provided a portrait of some of Wagner’s global ambitions. Among them a desire to send Russian mercenary troops some 800 miles south of Florida to the embattled country of Haiti, which has faced a litany of security issues since its president was assassinated by Colombian mercenaries in a 2021 coup.

“As of late February, Wagner associates planned to discreetly travel to Haiti to assess the potential for contracts with the Haitian Government to fight against local gangs, according to law enforcement reporting,” reads one of the photographed slides in the cache of documents reviewed by VICE News. 

Americas to threaten U.S. regional ambitions is a tale about as old as time. Whether positioning nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 or arming various Communist-backed paramilitaries in Latin America, the Soviet Union often looked to flex its security powers near the American mainland. In recent years, Nicaragua has allowed Russian troops to train in its territory, in what many saw as more of Putin using a Soviet-era provocation to taunt the Biden administration during its struggles in Ukraine.

But if Wagner was even capable of sending mercenaries so close to the U.S. it would represent an escalation of tensions between the Kremlin and Washington, almost certainly necessitating an American reaction if Wagner were actually successful in deploying to Haiti. It’s important to remember that while the Russian mercenary company has gained global name recognition for its efforts in Ukraine and Africa, it isn’t an endlessly financed or manned organization and is facing increased pressures from inside Russia. Prigozhin’s mercenary company has sustained crippling losses and over 30,000 casualties, while fighting Ukrainian forces.

April 11, 2023, 12:54 pm – Leaked Pentagon Docs Share Wild Rumor: Kremlin Plans to ‘Throw’ Putin’s War While He’s Getting Chemo (vice.com)

The leaked documents suggested that a top Kremlin general would sabotage the war while Putin is distracted with cancer treatments.

The leaked Pentagon documents contain a rumor that Russia’s top general is conspiring to “throw” the war in Ukraine while Putin is getting chemotherapy. 

Last week, classified documents from a Pentagon intelligence report made their way onto Telegram and Twitter after leaking on Discord. The leaks appear to have been printed out and photographed before being removed from a secure location. Along with information about troop movements and casualties in Ukraine, the documents also contain daily intelligence briefings, a collection of short bits of information from various sources around the world.

A document like this illuminates what intelligence can look like when it’s put on the page and the types of information that U.S. leaders are using in part to help them make their decisions. Every document contains a string of letters that serves as a shorthand explaining how the document was collected and who it’s for. The string at the top of the note about Russia “throwing the war” is (TS//SI//REL TO USA, FVEY/FISA). This means this document is top secret (its security classification), collected by monitoring communications (SI), is releasable to people with a top-secret security clearance in the USA or other “Five Eyes” countries, and was collected under the guidance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which sets the legal parameters for spying.

Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance between the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. This information was available to people in those countries with Top Secret clearance, but this specific memo was tailored for high-level Pentagon officials. The documents attribute the origin of the rumor to a Ukrainian official who, according to the documents, has a source with access to Kremlin officials.  There is no indication in the documents that U.S. intelligence confirmed the rumor is true, but at some point, a spy agency monitoring communications heard the rumor and decided it was worth passing on to officials at the Pentagon. (3)

April 12, 2023, 9:00 am – CYBER: What We Know about the Pentagon Leaks (vice.com)

Classified Pentagon documents leaked onto several Discord servers. What’s in them and how did this happen?

CYBER is the podcast of Vice’s Motherboard.   About this episode:

Top Secret classified Pentagon documents leaked on a Minecraft Discord server. The pages of documents contain sensitive information about troop placements in Ukraine, rumors about allies, and—weirdly—a character sheet for a tabletop roleplaying game. 

On this episode of Cyber, host Matthew Gault takes a back seat and lets Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler interrogate him about what’s in these classified Pentagon documents. (4)

April 13, 2023, 1:43pm – Leaked Pentagon Docs: US Airman Jack Teixeira Arrested (vice.com)

by M. Gault and B. Makuch

The leader, known as ‘OG’ on the Thug Shaker Central Discord, has been identified as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira. He was arrested Thursday afternoon.

The leader of a racist Discord channel where top-secret U.S. intelligence was leaked has been identified as 21-year-old Massachussetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira.

Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that Teixeira was arrested by FBI agents this afternoon, in a small town in Massachusetts, not far from Providence, Rhode Island. Publicly accessible air traffic radars reviewed by VICE News, shows police helicopters repeatedly circled a home in the area of Dighton and then have recently left. 

Teixeira is being charged for the “alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” according to Garland. 

The Air National Guardsman is very likely facing charges under the Espionage Act, since he allegedly leaked classified intelligence at the level of state secrets, which have unquestionably damaged the U.S. government. That could lead to decades in jail.

U.S. defense sources had said the Airman was to be arrested today, while the specific charges filed against him aren’t immediately available. The Department of Justice and the FBI, who were leading the investigation into the leak, have yet to release a statement.

“I’d refer you to [Department of Justice],” said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh when asked about the status of Teixeira.

The DOJ has yet to release a statement on the alleged leaker, but is investigating the matter. 

In a bombshell Washington Post report last night, a person called OG—Teixeira, according to a separate The New York Times report—was described as the ringleader of the Thug Shaker Central Discord server where he initially posted hand copied classified intelligence reports to impress his followers. In a video that OG posted to the server, he is apparently seen firing a weapon and yelling antisemitic and racist epithets.

But the alleged leaker went further when he began to photograph printed intelligence packets with what is believed to be Pentagon, NSA, and CIA level briefings for top-level Department of Defense officials, including General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top soldier in the U.S. military apparatus.

OG shared hundreds of documents with around 24 people in the Thug Shaker Central Discord group. They had labeled one sub-channel in the group “bear-vs-pig,” an off-color reference to Russia’s war in Ukraine where they dropped classified documents and memes about the war. Eventually, one of the group’s members downloaded the files, packaged them into a zip file, and shared them with other Discord groups, including one dedicated to the video game Minecraft. (5)

Breaking the Building Blocks of Hate: A Case Study of Minecraft Servers

The [Military] Accelerationism Research Consortium

In an Open Letter, Tristan Harris, et. al. Call for a Pause on the Training of AI Systems More Powerful than GPT-4

GPT-3, Neural Language Models and The Risks of Radicalization

Open-Source Intelligence Resources: Bellingcat and the Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map

We Are In The First Open Source Intelligence War

Bellingcat OSINT Investigation: An Analysis of Nicaragua’s “Volunteer Police” Paramilitary Arsenal

 

About Daniel Pereira

Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.