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Three days after the first news that spoke of it, something more is known about the online publication of dozens of confidential documents from the US Department of Defense. It is not yet clear who is responsible for the document leak, but while investigations by US authorities are ongoing, the investigative journalism site Bellingcat has published an article in which it reconstructs at least part of the path that the leaked documents have followed on the internet. At the same time, other newspapers, such as the New York Timeshave put together what is known about the documents and their content.
First of all, it is unlikely that it was a cyber attack, because the images circulating are photographs of printed documents and not scans of online pages. In total there are about one hundred documents: those that have been talked about the most are related to the war in Ukraine, but others concern the situation in the South China Sea and the activities of a Houthi rebel leader in Yemen. Although the first reports of the document leak were published on April 7, the documents had been circulating online for some time. Second Bellingcatsome had been published in March, and others in an even earlier period, although it is not yet clear when.
US intelligence sources confirmed that the documents are authentic. They do not provide particularly relevant information on the parties’ battle plans, but they do contain accurate numbers of people killed and wounded in the war: between 189,500 and 223,000 for Russia, and between 124,500 and 131,000 for Ukraine. In the same documents, however, the United States says it does not consider these figures entirely reliable.
Furthermore, and this is perhaps the most interesting part, the documents show the difficulties of the Ukrainian army, apparently more serious than what the government has publicly communicated. According to the leaked documents, Ukraine is short of ammunition and if no more were to arrive, its anti-aircraft defense system would be less effective.
From the investigation of Bellingcat it emerges that the first site where the documents appeared is Discord, a messaging app until recently very popular among people who are passionate about video games, now also widespread in other contexts. Discussions on Discord take place in large thematic groups called “servers”, which are themselves divided into further groups called “channels”. It seems that the documents were published on a channel dedicated to the Minecraft video game, and before that on another in which a Filipino youtuber was discussed.
From Discord, then, the documents ended up on other platforms, including Telegram, 4chan and Twitter. In particular, on April 5, they began to spread on some pro-Russian Telegram channels, including “Donbass Devushka”. A few hours earlier the same thing happened on 4chan, an image sharing platform known for its almost total absence of rules, which allows the publication of openly racist, violent or misogynistic content. The images posted on 4chan and on the Telegram channel “Donbass Devushka” were all different except one that reports the total deaths and those that occurred on the field of Russia and Ukraine.
However, the Telegram image shows different numbers than that of 4chan. While in the latter the deaths on the field of Russia are more than those of Ukraine, on “Donbass Devushka” it is the opposite: according to Bellingcat the figures of the document have been edited in an amateurish and approximate way, as evidenced by the inconsistencies in the font and in the spaces between the numbers.
At the beginning of March, part of these same documents had been published on the Discord channel which brings together fans of Minecraft, a very popular Microsoft video game that allows you to build imaginary worlds and share them online. On March 4, during a discussion about Minecraft maps and warfare, a user posted ten confidential documents. Subsequently on Twitter he had written that he had found them in another Discord channel called “WowMao” and dedicated to theFilipino youtuber of the same name.
However, second Bellingcat, the “WowMao” channel is not even the first place where the documents were published. Speaking to some Discord users who preferred to remain anonymous, Bellingcat became aware of another channel called “Thug Shaker Central”, now canceled, on which confidential documents have been circulating perhaps as early as January. Bellingcat he was unable to verify the information, because the users provided the only proof of the screenshots of the posts on that channel, which, moreover, has been closed and reopened several times and has taken on various names over time. According to the users he spoke to Bellingcatthe documents that ended up on “WowMao” and then on other platforms from “Thug Shaker Central” are only “the tip of the iceberg”.
In any case, the leak of information could prove to be a serious problem for the US authorities, who have opened two investigations into it, one by the Defense Department and one by the Justice Department. David E. Sanger, White House correspondent for the New York Times and national security expert, ha written that this specific leak of documents is worrying above all because it presents new methods compared to the past.
«The information revealed is much less» compared to other famous leaks, for example those caused by Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but at the same time they are «much more precise. And it is precisely the fact that they are so salient that worries the White House and Pentagon officials », the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. According to officials interviewed by Sanger, the leak of confidential documents is particularly harmful because it concerns information on the one hand that is extremely recent, just a few weeks old, and on the other hand classified as top secret o secreti.e. the highest levels of secrecy.