Major leak of classified US documents may have started in chatroom for gamers: Report

The major leak of classified US documents, which has caused concerns among international governments, might have started in a chatroom on a social media platform popular with games. According to a report by the Associated Press on Tuesday (April 11), a discussion held on Discord originally to talk about a range of topics turned to the ongoing war in Ukraine. One member of this chat said that an unidentified poster shared documents that were allegedly classified, first typing them out with the poster’s thoughts, and then beginning to post images of papers with folds in them.

The posts appeared to have gone unnoticed outside of the chat until a few weeks back when they started circulating more widely on social media. The records provided startling and surprisingly timely details of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) assistance to Ukraine. The report said the records also provided clues about efforts to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The images of the documents leaked on Discord included a top-secret analysis of deepening intelligence ties between Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and agencies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Citing signals intelligence, the March analysis said that FBS officers were caught claiming that the UAE agreed with Moscow to work together against US and UK intelligence agencies. The news agency also saw an analysis of what might happen in the Ukraine war in certain scenarios if Russian President Vladimir Putin or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were to die.

The Associated Press interviewed a person who he said was a member of this Discord chat group. The person, 18, did not wish to be identified. Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group, also spoke to this person and two others in the chatroom called “Thug Shaker Central.”

Last Saturday, Bellingcat said that documents from the chatroom appear to have been shared in another chatroom called “WowMao.” And from WowMao, the documents spread widely and were reported by many media outlets.

The 18-year-old Discord user told the news agency that he was on a call with others — including the person who for months had been posting documents he or she said were classified- when the news came out.

"We all just kind of lost it. We couldn’t believe what was happening," he said and pointed out he wanted to clear the reputation of a third person, who uses the screenname “Lucca.”

Posts from Lucca featuring many of the documents were widely shared on social media. The poster said that Lucca is just a kid and "was just consistently posting it to mess with people.”

He declined to identify the original uploader of these documents and referred to the uploader as "The O.G.". The poster further said that the person who first posted the documents, did not appear to be driven by ideology or to expose government secrets broadly, but rather to impress people in their group.

(With inputs from agencies)

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