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It looks that this forum either missed, or lacked interest in latest OSINT/spook world apocalyptic scandal.
Normie introduction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Pentagon_document_leaks
Twitter thread with more links:
https://twitter.com/RidT/status/1645048624294895619
TL;DR: Classified Pentagon documents suddenly appeared out of nowhere on
front page of New York Timesobscure Discord server. From this place, they circulated among less and less obscure Discord servers until they, in about a month, percolated into Russian Z telegram channels (who, in fit of genius, crudely changed in photoshop the casualties numbers, to make Russia look less bad).According to Pentagon insiders and online autists, the documents look genuine - internal consistency, consistency with open source information, the style, the powerpoint presentation, the bureaucratic lingo - all is correct. It is either work of expert team who studied Pentagon documents for their whole lives, or it is the real deal, the real leak.
The frantic behavior of TPTP - banning the responsible telegram channel, scrubbing the documents from Twitter and similar desperate fortifying the barn door when the horse is far beyond the horizon, also suggests authenticity.
How important they are? If FSB or GRU were monitoring "Thug Shaker Central" Discord channel and got the info when it was fresh, it could have very serious consequences. Now it is mostly of historical interest. Big mistake.
Now, the implications.
1/ US OPSEC is not as shitty as usual, it is getting worse. Any loser could walk around with his phone, take pictures of everything he wants and no one GAF. It is fortunate that no enemy agents managed to infiltrate Pentagon, only gamers who want to impress their buddies.
2/ Quality and loyalty of US personnel is getting way worse. The man responsible is supposed to be /pol/ style racist gun nut. Exactly the kind of person who is not wanted by the system, who should be stopped by even most basic background check. Another F for failure.
3/ Ukraine is not US puppet, Ukrainian government is in charge and keeps their plans and information for itself. Pentagon does not have any insider knowledge what is going on there - even their classified info is copy of official UKR announcements.
Now, what will be the consequences?
Not good for anyone. No one responsible will be punished (except the leaker, who will be made example of), and hammer will hard on anything resembling racism, transphobia and other unapproved thought. Take care.
Edit: leaker is named.
As expected. Racial science discovered long ago that while Hispanics are noble oppressed victims of white racism, Lusitanics are no good and should never be trusted.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/09/15/who-is-hispanic/
The biggest takeaway from all this for me has been the realization that I don't know enough about US National Guard. I used to think it was a dual loyalty (state/fed) internal military used to prevent or quell internal unrest during mass protests or man-made or natural disasters.
Air National Guard? Yeah, it would probably need transport and firefighting planes and helicopters and some recon UAVs. But turns out it's also the military reserve for the real Air Force, so it has the same kind of hardware the real Air Force does.
Air National Guard Intelligence Wing? Again, I expected the National Guard to be given the relevant intelligence by the DHS and the FBI so they would be aware of potentially dangerous people and groups in the locations they are deployed in, but I guess they have a link to the military intelligence for the same reason they have F16 fighter jets: if you activate a reservist intelligence officer, you don't want them to be overwhelmed by the data, so you keep them in the loop even when they are still a guardsperson.
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How plausible would it be for a leak like this to be manufactured by the US side? The actual American spooks easily meet the criterion of "expert team who studied Pentagon documents for their whole lives"; and I imagine US counterintelligence isn't sleeping at the wheel, so if they have a good grasp of actual Russian espionage efforts and what information they managed to procure, they could perhaps construct a bombshell document that consists of intel the Russians already have, a few additional morsels that they can verify but are not actually that consequential (in proportion to how much they would be willing to risk for such a stunt), and some big misdirections believing which might turn out absolutely fatal for Russia's effort to fend off any imminent counteroffensive.
Considering how unsympathetic the person announced as the leaker is, it doesn't sound like anyone would have moral trepidations about setting him up (e.g. by talking him into a treasonous mood and then conveniently forgetting the documents where he could find them); and any "criterion of embarrassment" reasoning about bugging the Koreans is weakened by the circumstance that this revelation had no meaningful impact after Snowden either. On the other hand, I don't have a sense for how costly a gambit this would be, particularly in terms of the "fuel budget" that is not-yet-leaked true intel you'd need to burn in order to add credibility, and if the biggest claims in it are confirmed and appear to lead to a change in RU strategy, this would be an argument for its authenticity.
It's hard to even be 100% certain that any of it's real, these days -- all I've seen in terms of "things that couldn't be faked by anyone with a keyboard" (plus the resources to fabricate the documents of course, which the US military certainly has) is a few grainy pictures of somebody being put in a paddy wagon. (which might not be so hard to fabricate from a keyboard nowadays either, but would be very easy to fabricate in meatspace if you were the US military)
Probably we will see some sort of public-ish trial to confirm that I'm being overcautious, but if not I would continue to be somewhat skeptical.
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I saw it but was skeptical of both the rumors' veracity and theMotte's interest. In either case I wanted to see how things shook out before commenting on it.
Very "on brand" of you to inject the HBD nonsense at the end though.
Am I wrong to have read the HBD bit at the end as sarcasm? We're supposed to speak plainly here, but every now and then some artiface slips through.
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It doesn’t shock me that security is lax in the pentagon. We haven’t fought a serious war against a major power in nearly a century. And the military isn’t as popular as it was decades ago, which makes it hard to recruit. A smart kid can make a lot more money tweaking instagram algorithms than working for the government, and without a strong appeal to patriotism, there’s not much to attract a kid.
Yeah, if the military stops recruiting underachievers with nothing to lose who post racist memes on obscure internet platforms, there ain’t gonna be a military.
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The original NYT, JapanTimes and Greyzone reporting show the Ukrainian casualty figure as 70k and the Russian as 17k. I’m more tempted to believe this happened and then the West retconned the numbers, as opposed to Russia frantically and successfully retconning the numbers and tricking the original journalists.
The version you are thinking of is a rather obvious photoshop of the original.
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Sorry but I don't buy it. I feel like if the neo-soviets really were inflicting a greater than 4 to 1 casualty rate on their opponents they would have won by now.
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That would make prolonged fighting for control of an elevator shaft next to a bombed out train station that much more embarrassing for Russia.
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It'd be pretty shocking for Russia to have a 4:1 casualty ratio in their favor and for the war to be going this poorly for them.
The Ukrainians have been drafting very intensively: the Economist points out a case in which they tried to draft a man who'd lost both hands until a social media storm forced them to stop. Draft officials have been snooping all over the place, including military funerals. This would suggest that manpower is being expended rapidly.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy
The Russians have a major advantage in firepower, they've been firing at least 4x more shells than Ukraine and they're still on their first wave of mobilization. It's unclear (at least to me) how many waves of mobilization Ukraine is on, they're on at least their 5th.
This later part isn't quite correct, as the the Russians are still doing their normal conscription cycles, as well as attempting what some have called 'stealth mobilization' efforts. The conscription cycle is more relevant to your point, since the war started at the first normal conscription levels, and the 'first wave' was more about replacing losses than actually expanding the force... which makes it more or less equivalent to the normal conscription waves once you implement stop-loss measures like the Russians have.
Russia is currently entering it's normal spring conscription cycle, which is yet another mobilization wave in practice, and will likely consider the need for another out-of-cycle mobilization based on the Ukrainian spring offensive (if there is one).
It's possible that the Russians don't implement a 'mobilization wave', but stick to their lower-level efforts, not out of a manpower concern, but mutual munition shortfalls. While Russia has been firing more shells than Ukraine, both have reportedly been extremely constrained, and Russia's scope for offensive capacity via artillery lessened with the generally failed offensive of he last two months.
Munition shortfalls is one of the reasons why stormtrooper detachments have been reintroduced, and stormtrooper tactics require a constant influx of mobilized troops to replenish the losses.
The new electronic mobilization law is a way to avoid attention-drawing mobilization waves. With a push of a button, you can summon as many men to the draft stations as you need, and if they don't present themselves, they get slapped with a whole roster of restrictions: their driving license is suspended, they can't buy a train or plane ticket, their business license is suspended etc.
I don't disagree (with you).
I'd disagree that these are actually stormtrooper tactics, though this could be the pedantic in me.
WW1 stormtroopers depended on heavy artillery support to suppress enemy forces so that the stormtrooper detachments could approach, fix, bypass, and then clear the enveloped positions, and it was extremely high attrition on higher-quality troops even when 'successful.' The Russian adoption seems to invert this- it's being done because of a shortage of the pre-requisite (suppressive fire munitions), and it's being done with inferior rather than higher quality forces (ie. those least able to carry the momentum). If you take away what made stormtroopers effective, you get less storm and more Somme.
Rather than a countermeasure for artillery shrotages, my read is that this is the Russian army trying to adopt what seemed to work from the Wagner approach with prisoners as part of pushing out Wagner in the ongoing turf battle, but what Wagner did wasn't stormtrooper strategy as much as turn-based strategy micromanagement. Hyper-focused individual infiltration and attack plans against specific battle position attacks would be planned, surveilled, suppressed, attacked, and re-suppressed at a squad level. This did indeed get results over time... but these results were the Wagner casualty ratios that the Russians dismissed because, well, prisoners.
My feeling is that there's a bit of a political disconnect between the Russian army, the Wagner 'stormtroopers', and Putin. Wagner got 'results' because it was willing to spend huge numbers of casualties doing so. Putin was willing to accept the prisoner casualty rates because it was politically low cost due to being 'Wagner' and 'prisoners,' not 'conscripts' or 'good Russians.' The Russian army won't get equivalent results without equivalent casualties, but they can't endure equivalent casualties with equivalent political cost.
I'm not saying Putin sincerely cares about the casualties, but he does care about the political costs of various mobilization actions, hence the various efforts to skirt around mobilization the first place, and transitioning the entire Russian Army to Wagner tactics is neither going to produce great victories or keep the political costs below the level of increased mobilization.
This I fully agree with, and I think it's going to serve as a case study of what digitized governance can do to try and coerce people into supporting the state... and the limits thereof.
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The Wehrmacht in 1943-44 was putting up impressive casualty ratios all the way back to the Vistula.
Sure, but Russia is fighting a country with a fifth of its population and Germany was fighting several countries with I think a much larger combined population.
Russia is fighting a country with a third of its population.
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What I've heard was that it was pro-russian posters online that edited the document, presumably to own their online pro-ukrainian opponents, not the actual Russian government.
I'd say that's entirely believable.
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If that's true, that would pleasantly surprise me. Ukrainians in general have been uncritically trusting to the US, and uncritically in love with Dem politicians in general. I guess it's true that they get big bucks from them, but that could stop at any moment it proves inconvenient, and Ukraine will need to go on somehow. If they realize that and keep their cards close to their vest, good for them.
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Or they are just smart enough not to brag about it. Remember the Chinese got the whole OPM database (together with biometric data)? This led to virtually no consequences to anyone who screwed up except for some resignations, and it looks like nothing changed (Wikipedia even reports the same passwords being still used, though that would be hilariously dumb, bordering on purposeful enabling, but by now I am ready to believe anything). If a random 21 year old dude can just take top secret docs and spill them to his gaming bros, what can a determined spy do to this clownish mockery of security? Probably anything they want to do.
Random 21 year old dude can't. A 21 year old dude who has gotten a background investigation leading to a security clearance and has need to know and has had it pounded into his head that if he leaks this stuff he can be thrown into pound-me-in-the-ass-Federal-Prison can. The trick with a "determined spy" would be getting them to pass the background investigation.
Or befriend someone who did and get them to spill all the secrets. If a congressman is not too hard of a target, what is? How hard would it be for a smart and attractive female to get a 21 year old male to dance to any tune? If he is doing it for his game buddies, what he'd do for someone who actually can get him laid?
Not as easy as you'd think, because a 21 year old male who has little problem getting laid is going to be suspicious of a woman asking him detailed questions about his job... and a 21 year old male who has a lot of problems getting laid is going to be EXTREMELY suspicious of said woman.
You seem to have a very elevated image of a horny 21 year old male. Most of them wouldn't be thinking too much with the right head in such situation, and only a minority would rationally evaluate the situation. And you need only one to get all the access. I would certainly be glad if I could be sure 100% of people who get access to classified data are carefully screened to be the cream of the crop of rationally thinking men, uncharacteristically mature and serious. However, I don't think anything I knew for a while or learned recently supports such a conclusion.
How do you expect this intelligence gathering to work? A congressman is a relatively easy target because he expects women to fall all over him due to his power, and spilling secrets to impress his new paramour is more or less something he considers a perk -- and expects her to be attracted to. All she has to do is encourage him. A regular guy who happens to have a security clearance doesn't have or expect that kind of relationship with women; a woman who wants to hear secrets right off the bat will set off alarm bells. So either she's going to have to play a fairly long game, or find a guy who is willing to trade secrets for sex while pretty much knowing what he's doing -- and the clearance process is supposed to weed that second type out, though of course it doesn't always.
Being a horny 21 year old doesn't mean you have no mind at all and will spill secrets to the first hottie who says hello.
There was that pfizer guy who got tricked by a right wing journalist. All they needed was to find a guy with a big mouth who wanted to brag. You may as well suggest that no one would be stupid enough to do this for clout to their discord buddies. The modern spy need only join the right disccord server.
Your example differs in basically all the particulars and thus demonstrates nothing.
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This is how most spies operated during the cold war. Find and befriend people with access who had the right ideology or could be bribed to leak documents.
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I find it hilarious that the leaks happened on what basically appeared to be an Orthodox meme Discord channel. It's something I might very nearly be a part of... if I didn't make a point of trying to steer clear of e-Orthodoxy and just concentrating on the local community.
Are you really orthodox if you don’t shitpost online about the pope being a heretic and canon 6 of Nicaea?
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Where are you reading about the nature of the discord channel?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/pentagon-leak-traced-to-video-game-chat-group-users-arguing-over-war-in-ukraine
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Not quite how classification works.
It’s more like radiation. Any effort spent on a classified topic has to be done in an accredited room, which will be access-controlled, plastered with warning signs, and very expensive. Otherwise the toxic waste might leak. The access control means only people with the right clearance (or tedious supervision) get in.
If he was an IT guy, and he had to go turn a TS/SCI server off and on again, he had to have that clearance.
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Given that word on the street is that he was a SCIF custodian, yes, they absolutely could. The junior airman who stands guard at the entrance and checks people in and out of the bunker has the keys to the bunker. It's a who watches the watchmen type scenario.
Those documents should have additionally been in a safe when not being used, but of course that doesn't always happen.
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Top Secret with both human and technical intelligence caveats, it's pretty high level classified. Him being 21 years old means nothing; the youngest person with a clearance gets access to anything they have need to know for. Why the Massachusetts Air National Guard was involved with this is another question, but maybe there's a good answer.
How anyone with as poor OPSEC as this guy got a clearance probably doesn't have a good answer. If you managed to get a clearance then you should know enough to be better at leaking than this.
I mean, you could say the same about Reality Winner.
Zoomers are 0 for 2 on OPSEC so far.
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I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. Any enemy agents worth worrying about already have copies of it. So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find. Is there stuff in there that's just uncomfortable for the Pentagon to have widely known, or is it just an attempt to downplay the story by making the evidence harder to find?
The special forces in Ukraine bit is problematic for the Pentagon. Most people following closely thought that was probably the case. However, there is now confirmation that NATO forces are in a limited shooting war with Russia.
The Dem base is currently solidly in support of the White House strategy in Ukraine. A big chunk would probably push for a diplomatic settlement if they knew how close Victoria Nuland is to starting WW3.
Wait, was there? I thought the docs just said the special forces were in Ukraine. They might just be trainers/"military advisors" or like. Unless I missed something?
While officially denied by both sides, there've been a lot of rumors of Russian fighters engaging and firing upon British and Polish aircraft over the Baltic. One of the juicier tid-bits in the cache appears to confirm or at least support this rumor. IE there's a NATO memo stating that after an unspecified incident involving the RAF all manned aircraft operating in the area are to be escorted by armed fighters and authorization to fire has been delegated to local commanders.
There was a near-miss (or near-shoot, rather) incident recently.
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Looks like you're right, there's a lot of ambiguity.
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I think it’s probably theater.
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It’s not supposed to be out there. The Pentagon acts accordingly. Whether or not such actions are particularly effective is secondary to the sense of Doing Something.
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So you answer your own question!
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Is it clear that "TPTB" are actually directing the scrubbing? It seems possible to me that many of the intermediaries like Discord and even Telegram have reasons to avoid hosting actually-classified content of their own volition, from "remain in the good graces of the DOJ" to "we're patriotic and Support Our Troops". Those posting originally also have reason to clean up what they can, although I doubt they can actually hide their actions from the DOJ.
AFAIK, the legal penalties for classified documents are almost exclusively due to violating the SP-312 NDA the government requires for access. I don't know what teeth, if any, are actually relevant to non-signatories (The New York Times writers, for example) in peacetime.
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The Powers That Pee?
I mean, I’d bet my entire meager savings that Joe Biden is wearing the highest-quality adult diapers modern science has produced, and that they need to be replaced frequently. Or maybe OP knows something about the infamous Trump Pee Tape that we don’t.
If this were true, there'd already be a 4chan schizo-collage pointing out the diapers on photos of Biden.
A thin layer of industrial-grade sodium polyacrylate would be completely undetectable.
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Every president has a pee tape, making one is part of the application process. Trump's was released in a misguided attempt to bring him in line. Well there are tapes, reels, zoetropes and tastefully drawn flip books.
I need to know how far back this goes. Is there a “pee daguerrotype” of Andrew Jackson? Do we have the photographic evidence to finally conclusively figure out what was going on between James Buchanan and William Rufus King, and whether or not it involved pee-pee? Did Washington and Adams have to hire Gilbert Stuart to produce photorealistic portrait depictions of them draining the snake?
I don't want to reveal all my research, because I already have enough competition for the national treasure from Nic Cage, but it goes all the way back. I'll give you a hint where to start looking though - the Washington monument? It was originally a fountain. And what happens if you pee on the inside walls? I think you will be surprised when you find out!
Nominated for quality contribution.
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Or is that what they want you to believe?
I'm sure the Russians feel like Walter Model who's just been given the plans for Operation Market Garden.
I wouldn't trust a damn thing from this if I were them. Though I agree with you that it does seem authentic.
Interestingly there is a photoshopped version of the document floating around that swapped the casualty numbers to make Russia look better, beware of that.
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Can the US security apparatus @Dean be reached for comment at the time of writing?
No, but the Dean who has worked with Americans before can be.
I don't have much to say- someone leaks a trove of American classified documents every decade or so, and has been since the Vietnam war, and even earlier. The modern size and scale is an expected and established consequence of the post-9-11 reforms to increase the flow of classified information within the US government. I suppose the evidence that the information continues to flow does put to rest Julian Assange's theory of government by conspiracy that could be paralyzed into incapacity by leaking. At this point, you don't give the Americans something you're not willing to have stolen and leaked in global media... but that's not actually that many things, really, and the benefits of trading intel with the Americans are often enough that things like this are the cost of doing business. Governments will pretend to be shocked, shocked they tell you, that the Americans have an intelligence aparatus that reports on them.
The Nybbler has the right of it for the most important things, and a lot of the leaked material is boring precisely because most intelligence is things that already are known from unclassified sources, but just with a stamp of authenticity / endorsement / credibility boosting. (Sometimes.) I'm not really surprised by anything I've heard come up, but then again I was admittedly surprised that anyone was surprised by the Snowden leaks, which was overwhelmingly in the 'well, obviously you could be doing that' to anyone with a computer-related degree.
What interests me more is the role that mental health seems to play in the alleged leaker. Once upon a time there were a shorthand for why people betrayed their countries that went by MICE- Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego- with most motives/rationals for defections/leaking falling into one or the other. This one... 'Ego' might be closest, but that's usually about someone being incredibly Proud and retaliating for an offense given, or trying to prove themselves right and be validated. Here, the validation seems to have been of the sort of a lonely, likely isolated socially and politically, young adult just coming through the Pandemic and whose social hangout was an obscure discord server. We'll see what rational they provide, if any, but the fact that this was allegedly circulating for some time, rather than raced to the presses, and yet they were still in their position / in country, suggests their motivation wasn't based on expecting release.
A final point, and why I didn't raise this topic last week, is I'm not clear on how much misinformation has been slipped in, and not just by Russia but possibly others. Obvious casualty edits being obvious doesn't mean that other documents without obvious edits aren't edited- and as a trick to draw attention away from other things, that would be an obvious technique if agencies are involved. It's also quite possible that other sources of misinformation may come up- by the sounds of it the documents were circulating for some time, meaning there's a window where someone could make a call that a leak was likely iminent, but suppression impossible, but adding things into the intel-ball might have been possible to spotlight and use later. Who knows, we'll see, or probably won't.
Does that answer your interest?
Thanks. Yeah, nothing groundbreaking. The opacity of the ukrainian position puzzles me, given that the US is not shy about spying on their friends and populace. You’d think with a raging war and constant contact with US intelligence they would get more info out of Ukraine, willingly or unwillingly.
I think the correct explanation here is that the 'American empire' and 'American vassal' meme is just that- a meme- and people think that the Americans run other countries out of the local US embassy. Yes, the US has interests in knowing how countries are internally considering things. But the overwhelming way countries do this is by telling eachother directly in meetings. Countries by and large don't maintain comprehensive summaries of their political and military positions on centralized databases to be scooped up all at once.
I think the easiest explanation for most to swallow, however, would be the point that any method the Americans could use to spy on Ukrainian systems, the Russians could as well, and both the US and Ukraine have a strong interest in Ukraine defending from the later. For all that Snowden leaked so much about American signal intelligence, that doesn't change you need, well, a signal to intercept. The sort of things the Ukrainians don't share, probably aren't easy to collect, and also likely judged not worth the cost per see. The US doesn't need to spy on the Ukrainians to prevent them from using American long-range weapons against Russia- they just don't provide them. And if you're not providing certain things, you don't need to press for the intelligence about said things either.
Aye, that vassal stuff is way overused, but it's one way for the most egomaniacal americans and their foreign enemies to agree on something.
What's the latest on north stream from your end? Little ukrainian-polish men feeling patriotic?
For American vassalization, at this point I just chalk it up to cultural chauvinism and American-centricism, even when it's not done by Americans or by people who'd recoil at the thought.
For nord stream, it makes as much sense as anything else I've seen, which is to say I've seen and heard of nothing that could be considered authoritative. Then again, I've also said that I find it credible for anyone to have done it, and that there are reasonable reasons for the Baltic powers that might know to keep quiet regardless of who actually did it, be it overly patriotic types of western powers or Russian types. Any official acknowledgement might comes with political pressures to Do Something they'd rather not do, regardless of who did it.
I will maintain that the Seymour Hersh story was laughably weak, and has been damned by how little weight it carries even amongst the sort who would usually applaud.
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