The kicker is the final paragraph:<p>> To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member.<p>If this is real, it’s insane that WaPo beat the DoJ to get to these people.<p>Also, how stupid are these kids to publicly talk to reporters about their involvement and receiving state secrets (the kid requested his voice <i>not</i> be masked!!). People have been imprisoned for receiving classified information and this is one heck of a clown show the DoJ will want to appear completely on top of.<p>For real, guys: don’t talk to police or reporters <i>or anyone</i> when you’re involved in a mess (even one much smaller than this). Get a lawyer and learn how to say “no comment!”
If the article is accurate, how could someone who'd been through whatever onboarding for security clearance think that this was a good idea, or think that the documents wouldn't also spread once leaked?<p>Is it mental illness? (Like, they couldn't extrapolate from training like "Following the classified materials handling protocols is important, because... Be vigilant against foreign operatives attempting to befriend you, because... Etc...." to implied practices like "Oh, hey, and don't steal classified materials and post them in Internet social venues, not even your own private Discord of Internet randos, because that has similar problems"? Or could they see the similarity, but they thought they were above it?)<p>And/or was the wider spread of the intel beyond the Discord actually intended?
> OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.<p>Why is that a "baseless notion" (which is stated in the newspaper's voice)? It might be far-fetched, but this "OG" guy had proven access to top secret documents, and (IIRC) that shooter left all kinds of documents and plans online. It's not inconceivable that "federal law enforcement officials" picked up something that told them a shooting was likely to happen, didn't act, and this guy was privy to some document or conversation about that. Weaseling "baseless" in there reeks of condescendingly making sure to tell the plebs exactly what you want them to think at every opportunity.
After so many years of security research, and the well known use of solutions like honeytokens, properly hidden in documents, meant to raise an alert on each occurence of exposure, I'm amazed we're still reading things like month long unawareness of critical info like this being leaked in public forums.
I am not sure how much I trust this explanation. A lone discord user was responsible for a top secret leak because of some banal online argument? Doesn't sound right. Almost too convenient to hide some deeper systematic cracks in the intelligence agencies and their incompetence in securing their own secrets.<p>I know, don't attribute malice where stupidity suffice. But something just nagging me about how inane this whole explanation is.
The DoD really dropped the ball by granting access to this information to such a wide group of people, according to the article. "Thousands of people". What happened to need-to-know?
TLDR:someone with an intel exchange or clone tor url was reposting material from it to discord shocker.<p>The real scandal here is that none of these supposed media outlets are reposting the documents, nor putting what they say in context of other leaks like the one from mossad back in January.