Il Washington Post he claims to have obtained information on the person responsible for the online dissemination of dozens of confidential documents from the US Department of Defense: it would be a man who was passionate about weapons who worked on a military base and who administered an online group on Discord, a very popular messaging platform popular, which also allows you to create private group chats.
Il Washington Post interviewed a teenager who was in turn part of the online group along with about twenty other people, mostly men and boys united, says the newspaper, “by a love of guns, military equipment and God”. The teenager interviewed told, on condition of remaining anonymous, how things would have gone. It must be considered that there are still no certainties as to whether the documents were uploaded for the first time to that online group, and that the investigations by the American authorities are only in the early stages. The Washington Posthowever, seems to have gathered a number of items that look pretty solid.
According to people who have spoken to the Washington Post, last year the man behind the disclosure of the documents, indicated by the letters “OG”, began to share messages full of acronyms and written in specialized language with the other members of the group that he himself administered on Discord. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read that first long note, which hundreds more followed in the months that followed. They looked like near-literal transcripts of classified intelligence documents, explained the teenager interviewed. OG, whom the other members greatly admired, claimed to know secrets that the government kept from ordinary people and which he obtained because he worked on a “military base”.
OG said he spent part of his day inside a facility that prohibited cell phones and other electronic devices that could be used to document secret information hosted on government computers. So he started by transcriptioning some of the confidential documents by hand, also trying to make certain passages understandable: for example, explaining that “NOFORN” meant that the information in the document was so sensitive that it should not be shared with foreign nationals.
OG told the group that he had worked for hours transcribing the documents and when manual transcription became fatiguing he started posting photos of those same documents: “He’s an intelligent person. He knew what he was doing when he published these documents, obviously,” said the group member interviewed by the Washington Post.
This teenager’s account was confirmed by a second member of the group who also read many of the same confidential documents shared by OG, and who spoke on condition of anonymity. Both of these people said they know OG’s real name and the state where he lives and works, but they declined to share this information.
Il Washington Post writes that he examined about 300 photos of confidential documents, therefore three times the number of those thought to be circulating. He then writes that he saw some of the documents transcribed by OG, an audio recording of a man the two team members identified as OG talking to his classmates, and portions of chats where OG communicates with his group on Discord. Finally, the newspaper says it has seen the video of a man identified as OG while he is at a range with a rifle: “he shouts a series of racist and anti-Semitic insults at the camera, then fires several shots at a target”.
One of the teenagers interviewed by the Washington Post he said OG was not hostile to the US government and insisted he was not working on behalf of any other country: ‘He is not a Russian agent. He is not a Ukrainian agent ». The channel on the server where OG started posting the doc photos (i.e. a chat within the larger Discord group chat) was named, by OG himself, “Bear vs Pig,” a reference to the war in Ukraine, but also to a video that went viral showing pigs fighting a bear. Again according to the teenager interviewed by Washington PostHowever, OG had “a dark view of government”: he described it, along with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as a repressive force that hides the truth from its citizens.
The boy interviewed thinks that their group hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. Of the approximately 25 active members who had access to the “Bear vs Pig” channel, approximately half were located overseas. Those who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to come mainly from the “Eastern bloc and post-Soviet countries,” the teenager said. “Even the Ukrainians were interested.”
Throughout the winter, OG has been uploading confidential documents for its group. Everyone knew they didn’t have to share them elsewhere. Unbeknownst to them, on February 28, another user of the “Thug Shaker Central” server began posting several dozen photographs showing the documents on “WowMao”, a Discord “server”, i.e. a group chat, dedicated to fans by the Filipino youtuber @wow_mao, who has been active since 2016 and mainly publishes videos halfway between satire and information on world history, geopolitics and international current affairs. On March 4, ten documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map”, another Discord server, and from there on some Russian Telegram channels, on 4chan, and finally on Twitter.
OG stopped sharing images in mid-March. But just before the New York Times told for the first time the news of the disclosure of the confidential documents, he joined the group again: «He said that something had happened and he prayed to God that this event would not happen». The teenager says he has been in contact with OG in recent days too, not on “Thug Shaker Central” which has since been closed, but on yet another group: he said that OG “seemed very confused and lost on the da get. He is fully aware of what is happening and what the consequences could be ». And again: «He is not sure how to resolve this situation. He looks quite upset.’ In his final message to his group chat mates, OG asked them to “delete any information that might relate to him,” including any copies of classified documents.