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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/
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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