The Washington Post said a person worked on a military base
The Washington Post reported on the leaked documents about the Ukrainian military counteroffensive and the search for national security secret in the YTAP news abrelian
There are details about the air defenses and plans for a future counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army in the latest leaked documents. Notably, the trove also reveals details about Russia’s war effort and exposes the degree to which the United States intelligence community has penetrated Russia’s military and intelligence services.
The New York Times, which broke the story, initially reported on 100 documents, but some reports said that more documents may have been passed on over the course of a few months. The documents are photographs of printed-out presentation slides. Some of the papers were folded before being photographed and there were other objects on the desk that were captured in the photos.
The Washington Post reported wednesday that the person who leaked the documents worked on a military base and posted national security secrets in an online group of acquaintances.
The Post reporting, which CNN could not independently verify, covers new ground in identifying the supposed leaker of highly classified documents – including some that paint a pessimistic US view of the war in Ukraine – and provides the first known details about who may be behind a major national security breach that has rocked Washington in recent days.
The report went on to describe the Discord server apparently controlled by “OG,” where recently leaked classified documents were posted, as a “pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends.”
“They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a ‘military base,’ which the member declined to identify,” the Post reported, referring to messages posted by the anonymous user.
“OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers,” according to the Post.
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The company is cooperating with law enforcement on the investigation, but it declined to give further information. CNN reached out to Discord after The Washington Post reported.
“He wanted to ‘keep us in the loop,’” the group member told the Post. According to the Post report,OG thought that his knowledge of the troubled world would protect him and the others.
The Discord chatroom, or “server,” disappeared from online after news of the leaks broke last week, according to a CNN review of Discord servers. Some of the documents were subsequently posted by Discord users to another invitation-only server. CNN reviewed messages on the platform and found that some users thought the documents were fake because they didn’t think anyone would be able to post them online.
According to its website, Discord has 150 million users a month, and it has increased in popularity due to the corona virus that was confined to homes.
The Pentagon has begun to limit who across the government receives its highly classified daily intelligence briefs following a major leak of classified information discovered last week.
The Pentagon’s Joint Staff has begun to cut its distribution lists and some US officials who used to receive briefings daily have stopped receiving them.
The intelligence arm of the Joint Staff had been trying to improve their security practices in order to make sure that the chairman’s daily intelligence brief was shared more broadly.
All the email lists have been reviewed, a senior defense official said, and some restrictions may only be temporary. Everyone on the lists had proper clearance, but not everyone needs to receive that information daily, the official added.
Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder in a interview with News Nation on Wednesday said the Pentagon is looking at “mitigation measures in terms of what we can do to prevent potential additional unauthorized leaks.”
In addition to email distribution lists, senior Pentagon officials are provided with tablets every day with the latest intelligence. Several Pentagon officials are given binders of printed intelligence daily as well as hard copies, according to two senior US officials as well as a source familiar with the process.
The former US official said that the military likes paper because of the desire to hold it close with their reading glasses on, and they have their staff kill trees because of that.
Because the leaked documents appear to have been printed out copies that were then photographed, investigators will undoubtedly be examining printer logs from the last several months, officials said.
An old US official said that the classified systems have multiple levels of risk controls, but a determined insider will find weak points over time. Paper remains a liability predominantly perpetuated by senior ranks.
“I think one of the things that will probably come out of this will be more of a move to providing information on tablets,” the former official said. “Senior leaders, some of them more technically astute, some like to have the papers so they can scribble on the margins and stuff like that.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, demand for the Pentagon’s daily intelligence briefing has risen, another official said, as multiple people at agencies across the government are eager for updates on Ukraine’s military capabilities and plans, which the Joint Staff tracks and analyzes closely.
One former official who previously had access to the daily brief while serving at an agency outside DoD during the Trump administration also lamented the fact that this leak almost certainly means there will be restrictions on who will now be allowed to see it, telling CNN that the deck was a helpful resource for top officials across the executive branch.
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The criminal investigation, meanwhile, is being led by the FBI’s Washington field office, including a team of counter-intelligence investigators experienced in hunting leaks.
Those investigators are also working with Pentagon officials on the damage assessment, which would become part of the evidence to be used in any potential prosecution that results.
The federal agencies changed their computer systems after the event to better track access to sensitive documents. Some systems record when employees open and close access to certain documents, and agencies use printers that record when employees print specific documents.
In the last few years, the capabilities of the NSA and other agencies have been improved to detect anomalies in the internet traffic from US-based systems, in order to prevent foreign hackers from moving large amounts of data from US computers. Those systems don’t monitor domestic US internet traffic.
Current and former officials say that the Defense Department has been slower to adapt to certain changes because of it’s large size.
Thousands of people who accessed the Defense Department documents have left a trail of forensic evidence that the FBI will have to comb through.
But if the documents posted to social media sites were photographs, it is possible that a camera phone could yield troves of metadata that could help investigators.
President Joe Biden appeared to suggest Thursday that the US government is close to identifying the leaker responsible for the disclosure of sensitive government secrets posted to social media.
“There’s a full-blown investigation going on, as you know,” Biden said when asked for comment about the leaks. “The intelligence community and the Justice Department. And they’re getting close. I don’t have an answer for you.”
The FBI has narrowed the number of people they think are connected to the leaks to a few people, according to two people briefed on the matter. A forensic trail left by the person who posted the documents has made it possible for investigators to look at a small number of people who have access to the documents. Investigators are working on building a case for prosecution, people familiar with the matter say.
Jeffrey Castro, a spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Division, said that CNN had reported that the division was assisting the Pentagon in their investigation of the leak. It is unclear if the alleged leaker works within the US Army.
