The Very Stupid Man Who Stole Army Secrets to Impress Gamers

The gang talks about the hundreds of top secret defense department documents that just got leaked by a weird fascist gamer trying to impress teenagers on Discord.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Ah, it's it could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart, and today I'm I'm happy that we're we're
recording this right now, James and Garrison, because we all
just got a historic example of something falling apart. Elon
Musk's Big silly rocket. We're recording this about a day

(00:27):
or so after it exploded in mid air over the
Gulf Coast, showering a turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's
such a such a fun news.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
It's comically perfect.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
It is. Really, it is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Perfect unless it crash landed in a kitten farm. That
couldn't really be Yeah perfect, No, I mean it. What's
nice is that it's given me. It's made me feel
young again because when I was a wee lad, I
was attending a speech a debate rally in Cooper, Texas,
when the last Space Shuttle to explode exploded directly over us,

(01:01):
blowing out a bunch of the windows in the building
and raining.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was. It was. Yeah. So
I whenever whenever a Space shuttle explodes over of some sort,
explodes over Texas, I get powerful nostalgia.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well, they they slipped the surly bonds of Verse to
blow out the windows in a high school in Kobe, Texas.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
That's that's how the line goes. It makes me think
of all the other things I was doing that day,
which was namely playing Lord of the Rings risk in
a high school gym as we as we were wont
to do great game, one of the better, one of
the better risk covers. What are we talking about today, friendos, buddies,
well shaple pals.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, we're talking.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
About talking about one one man having having a fun
time on Discord dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, doing the human equivalent of being a space ship
that explodes in the sky.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yes, I suppose Discord's not really a dot com. It's
it's more, it's more, it's more of a more of
an application now, but yes, it is what.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Good Discord and that I'm permanently banned from.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Please what did you do to Discord? You get from Discord?
I should a video?

Speaker 4 (02:21):
Who's on Discord?

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Right? Like the worst people?

Speaker 4 (02:24):
All of the worst people?

Speaker 3 (02:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
We tried to start a Discord for the fundraising live show,
and I tried with several emails, and every time it
came back with ban evasion.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
Wow, that is extremely funny James.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, I posted with chickens and it has never forgiven me.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Wow. Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent
and they were technically naked, so I think it does
count as revenge point.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
My chickens are always close. Little chicken pe.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Oh yeah, you're one of the pansies. There's a big
conflict in chicken owners and James has taken aside. So
we're talking this week about the discord, and this is
one of those things we came into this kind of
debating how much detail to go into. But when we
brought this up, like this is something that gare, James
and I is like a major thing in our bubble
for the last like week, so we've all been following it.

(03:14):
But when we brought this up in the work chat,
Daniel had no idea that this had gone on. So
we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of
what what people are calling the largest leak of top
secret US military and defense data since you know Snowden.
So we're we're going to go over all of that

(03:36):
right now. I think I want to start by talking
about an MMO RPG called war Thunder.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
This is a can you break down MMO RPG for
those of us.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
It's it's a it's like World of Warcraft. It's a
big video game that is play you play online with
a bunch of strangers. It's a free game. You use
like modern military weapons to like fight other players. And
it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic renderings
and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern tanks

(04:06):
and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels. Right so,
and it's like it's it's a game for war nerds, right,
Like you utilize like radar in a way that's broadly realistic,
Like if you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots
in another, the tank's weaponry works the way it's supposed

(04:26):
to be in the real world. The armor is vulnerable
where it's vulnerable in the real world. And this is
like the appeal to the kind of nerds who play
this game, and as you might guess, from a bunch
of people who really want to, like in the most
realistic way possible render and fight each other with modern
military vehicles. A significant number of these dudes are members

(04:48):
of various different like defense departments, right or at least
are employed in some degree of various different national military
forces several different As a result, like when arguments happen,
you know, with any MMORPG, if you're playing like World
of Warcraft right and like something gets nerved or something
isn't working as well as it's supposed to, you'll get

(05:10):
these like massive threads in the forums where people are
like arguing about how something needs to be changed or
changed back, or how there's a glitch or whatever. And
because war Thunder is so based in realism, when you
have these arguments online, it's often like, well, you know,
the F fifteen shouldn't work this way, it should work
this way, and people will get into arguments about that,

(05:30):
and then someone will as happened like a couple of
weeks ago, I think one we'll post sensitive information about
the F fifteen strike Egle in order to like prove
that it would function the way that they are arguing
it should function in this forum debate. That happened earlier

(05:51):
this year, and I think with the F fifteen, it
wasn't technically top secret information. It was information that US
citizens were allowed to have but not allowed to post
online because that's a violation of something called ear which
is a thing that governs the export essentially of military
information and technology. But on another situation, I think, like

(06:16):
a year or so ago information of it. I believe
the F twenty two was posted that was extremely sensitive,
that was like top secret. And these are again like
some dude who's got some sort of military job and
has a clearance and thinks that the right way to
use it is arguing about the video game War Thunder.
These are not just Americans. I want to be clear

(06:36):
about that. In July of twenty twenty one, there was
a player arguing about a Challenger two tank who claimed
to have been a former tank commander with the British Army,
and he shared information from the Army Equipment Support publication.
The information had been labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified.

(06:57):
And other lakes has been a little more gall A
French Army soldier leaked information on the Clerk main battle
tank that was top secret, and a Chinese user leaked
capabilities of the Chinese Armies DTC ten one hundred and
twenty five millimeters anti tank round that should not have
been leaked. So this shit keeps happening in war Thunder.
It's like a joke like the war th Under account

(07:20):
when these discord leaks happened a week or so ago,
like joked about it. But like the thing that the
game is known for, Yeah, is these like different people
in different national defense apparati can't stop themselves from like
leaking stop secret info about vehicles.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
It's very funny. It gets the only reason I know
why war th Under exists. I think it's the only
reason why we know a decent amount of what like
by we here and meaning that could like I guess
Western militries no, which of course we are all members of.
No about the Russian main battle tanks is from war
th Under leaks.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Yeah, very funny.

Speaker 5 (07:56):
Yeah, and you have to assume I would be surprised
if no one had tried just like having you know,
an agent from a national security agency in uh oh,
for sure they're trying to like be like trying to
like provoke arguments about Chinese tanks or whatever.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
I'd be shocked if that hasn't happened.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, Like the overlap between like people who might play
warth Under anyway and people who might work for a
national security agency, like those Van diagrams are.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
A circle, yeah, exactly, So it's one of those things
where this happens a bunch on war thunder, but it's
just kind of something that people joke about because these
leaks like they're meaningful, I guess to like militaries care
about them, but like you sitting at home, you hear like, oh, hey,
details of like the couple of construction of the new
abrams like models as leak. That's not like the same

(08:49):
as I don't know, Chelsea Manning leaking information about like
war crimes by the US military in Iraq, or Edward
Snowden leaking info about like the NSSA, Like it's a
little less relevant to most. What we started seeing a
couple of weeks ago is documents top secret labeled documents,
like actual pictures of straight up unredacted top secret US

(09:13):
Defense Department documents just kind of filtering out over various discords,
and they were kind of appearing in random little bits.
You'd see one that was like an update on the
war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that
the US military had about the ability of the Ukrainian
military to carry out the counter offensive that everybody's expecting
in the near future. You had like casualty estimates from

(09:37):
the US military. Another document that was leak had like
a bunch of information inside the Russian General staff. So
these are number one, very serious leaks, right you're talking about,
especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle.
You're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major
US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking

(09:59):
about leaks that just kind of reveal the degree to
which the CIA has an enormous amount of information apparently
at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin. You know.
So these are very significant leaks, but they didn't appear.
They weren't being like you know, kind of filtered out
and released by an agency like Wiki leaks, They weren't

(10:22):
being sent to journalists. They were just kind of showing
up in these you know, Discord is basically a series
of chat rooms, and they were just kind of showing
up in different discords. So this is, you know, a mystery,
and it's the kind of mystery that like a certain
kind of person who is extremely online is not going
to be able to get out of their head and

(10:42):
is going to kind of try to trace back to
its origin and in the case of this specific mystery.
The nerd who could not get it out of their
head and decided to trace it back to its origin
was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Tohler. Eric is
a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled
researcher that I've ever met in my life. And you know,

(11:06):
Eric started seeing these, like everyone else, these top secret documents,
and was like, where the fuck are these coming from?
And this is one of those things we'll talk about.
It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people
in the day since. But when this kind of started,
Number one, you can't really deny there was an intense
public interest in figuring out what the origin point of

(11:27):
these was, because that was the only way to figure
out are the these actual leaks. When you see something
that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly
on the internet, if you call up the US government
and you say, hey, is this real top secret in
They're not going to say yes, right Like, you don't
get that response from them, I mean.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
And especially right now with all of like the AI
chat generation tools, generating fake documents is one of the
main things people are doing for disinfo. Generating like fake
soce fake documents. Of course, you can like edit things
the further to like make them seem more realistic. But yes,

(12:08):
someone who was extremely curious is going to wonder if
this is actually like a real thing or if this
is just some like bullshit prank or something.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
And there were edits of these documents did also go violin.
In fact, Tucker Carlson, one of the original documents shows
kind of US estimates for killed in action on Ukraine's
on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side in
the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian casualties than Ukrainian casualties,
which is consistent with all previous reporting, but the edit

(12:39):
of it showed something like many times as many Ukrainian
dead as Russian dead, which is, you know, something that
was valuable for the people who are trying to argue that,
like this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians.
Guys like Tucker Carlson, who covered the leaks on his
show and knowingly used the fake edit of the league,

(13:01):
I can't imagine. I have to assume it was knowingly
because it had been very well exposed by that point.
So there's really no other explanation I think. But anyway,
the fact that there were edits of these documents that
were not legitimate going around, it's just kind of part
of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying
to figure out where the fuck are these things coming from.

(13:21):
Eric is again an extremely good researcher, and through a
mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of
like calling up people and talking to them, he found
what appeared to be the source of these leaks, which
was an invitation only clubhouse on discord of like thirty
ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it

(13:45):
kind of became clear that this group was a bunch
of kind of young people who had gotten together during
the pandemic to talk about, you know, games. These guys
are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in
high school. They kind of were cut off from their friends,
so they wanted a place to be social. They would
share memes, including like extremely racist, you know, borderline Nazi shit.

(14:10):
They would like watch movies over and like chat over
kind of the voice app. They were all what you
call trad cats, which is like basically weirdo Catholic fundamentalists,
like I think a lot of them deny Vatican two,
that sort of shit. It's like a whole thing. A
lot of them were that at least, so there were
a lot of like praying in anyway, a bunch of weirdos.

(14:33):
And the head of this group of weirdos was the
oldest of them, a guy who was known on like
in the discord as og and Og. He's a was
you know, in the Land of the teenagers, the person
in their early twenties who can buy an AR fifteen
is king. And so this guy is in his early twenties.

(14:56):
He's in the military, which he talks about. He posts
videos of him like shooting guns and like you know,
saying racial slurs and like signposting to these like you know,
weird memes and stuff that they're all into, which to
them like makes him seem extremely cool. Right. It's one
of those things when you kind of read the different
coverage of this, it's there's a little bit of like

(15:20):
weird culty stuff going on. I don't know if I'd
say that it was a cult in more than just like.

Speaker 4 (15:27):
In every discord server is a cult exactly.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
The insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects
of cult dynamics.

Speaker 6 (15:35):
Right, Hey, everybody, Robert here.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
We had a little audio error obviously in the recording.
I wanted to clarify this section because it was kind
of garbled. The name of the discord server they were
in was thug Shaker Central, which is potentially a reference
to one of a couple of things. You'll find some
disagreement about this online, but it's not really relevant. That's
the discord name that they've worked under. You get, like

(16:09):
the overall point of this, it's a bunch of like
kids who are fans of games. They're fans of like
this this YouTuber Oxide. It's like a little group of
dudes who got together via fandom and the pandemic and
over the course of years developed like a shared culture.
And part of the shared culture is this guy og

(16:30):
who's the older one of them, you know, trying to
keep them aware of what he thought was important about
kind of global politics, and that particularly included aspects of
like battlefield conditions in Ukraine, information about North Korean ballistic missiles,
all of this kind of stuff that he had access
to because spoilers. He was in an Air National Guard

(16:52):
wing as an intelligence and like it was in the
intelligence sector of like an air National Guard ring, and
he had a security classification, right, And once this all
got revealed, people are like, why the fuck is a
twenty one year old because that's this guy's age have
access to top secret data, And everyone who knows anything
about the way our government classifies information was like, most

(17:15):
of the people access are like twenty Yeah, fights are
wars fifty year olds.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, I think it does genuinely like you know, like
if we've been around war and conflict of the people
who do it quite long, I think most people would
be genuinely burn away that most people doing it are children.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, And this has caused like obviously some problems before
for the Defense Department, but it's also like it's kind
of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce
are always going to be young kids. These are spoilers
shitty jobs often and that's the only one who will
do a.

Speaker 6 (17:54):
Lot of them.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
And also, just like if you're fighting a war, most
of the people you have that are going to be
tasked with field intelligence are going to be in this age.
And see, it's not at all weird that this guy
had access to this shit. What is weird is that.
So he starts off kind of like arguing, you know,
sometimes he'll bring up stuff that he knows that's from
classified documents while he's arguing, you know, about the war

(18:15):
in Ukraine or whatever with these friends online, and then
he starts doing like a series of regular updates where
he'll basically he'll type out details from like a bunch
of different top secret documents and these massive, long and
apparently kind of hard to read posts, and he'll just
like post them into the chat to kind of keep
his friends abreast of what he thinks is, you know, important.

(18:38):
But he gets frustrated over time that like they're not
reading this shit because it's really boring and like kind
of weird to just infoed up top secret info, and
they don't. These kids don't again, like these other folks
are like in high school. They don't really realize where
he's getting the info or what he has, but they do.
The folks who do pay attention recognize over time that
like stuff will happen in the real world that corresponds

(18:59):
to something, and he posted a couple of weeks ago
and they're like, wow, he seems to have like actually
really good information. Eventually, og gets frustrated because he's not
no one's paying attention to his posts, so he starts
taking photos of just the top secret documents themselves and
posting them in the discord day.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
Now this is unbelievably illegal.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, he really crossed a line there. I just don't
believe it would be dumb by the way it was
illegal before, but this is really illegal in terms of
like allowing yourself making it so much easier for the
consequences of you're fucking around to find you like that.
He crushed the rubicon right there.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Yeah, so, and and now we have to face the
hard question is this guy an illegalist king or is
he more problematic? And this is this is the question
that we have to actually focus on now stop because
it is. It is, on one hand, pretty funny. It's
exceedingly funny.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
There's zero argument there among people who aren't shiptheads. It's
very funny. Yeah, it's very.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
Funny that like he could be doing an illegalism with
that with with zero intention of doing so.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
Now, I do think there's a some people have kind
of errantly called him a whistleblower.

Speaker 4 (20:21):
I just not that's not active. That is that is
not what he's doing.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
He's a Nazi who's posting topsycret information to impress children online.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
That's right, Garrison. I do think we have to. I
think we have to. Let's let's dig into that a
little bit, because a whistleblower is somebody who exposes information
from inside of an organization for some sort of purpose. Right.
They believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that,
like there's they believe there's some sort of public interest

(20:54):
in information that is being kind of siloed inside of
an organization that they're a part of, and they release
that organization. Right, Fundamentally, that's what a whistleblower is. This
guy was telling his friends and this thirty person discord,
do not post these anywhere else. This is not stuff
that you're allowed to share. This is just for your
eyes because we're friends. Right. He does not intend for
this to get out. But here's the thing. All of

(21:19):
his friends in this group are like dumb kids, and
just like those people on war Thunder, they start getting
into arguments with people outside of the discords yet and
other discords discords. One of them is a fan discord
for some other YouTuber. One of them is the discord
is a Minecraft discord, and they get into arguments with
random other users about like the war in Ukraine and stuff.

(21:42):
And when they're having those arguments, they'll hear someone make
a point and they'll think back to a top secret
document that OG posted, and they'll be like, well, I
know you're wrong because I've seen some CIA like satellite
footage that shows that this isn't accurate. And rather than
being like, well, I guess I can't prove this person
wrong on the Internet without exposing my friend in our

(22:03):
private discord to being imprisoned for the decade, they just
grabbed top secret documents that he posted and they post
them in these other discords, and that's how this shit
breaks containment right now. It's one of those things I
do want to note that, like, these are not generally speaking,

(22:26):
super pleasant people. OG is the kind of guy who,
like one of his big arguments that he tries to
like make to these kids, he like claims that based
on the top secret info he has, which he posts,
nothing that proves this. The mass shooting in Buffalo, New
York by that Nazi at that majority you know, black
frequented grocery store, that that was like a government plot

(22:50):
to institute gun control, and shit, it was a false flag.
So he's not just posting good. He's like lying here too,
because obviously there's no intelligence to post backing that up.
He just he's just kind of trying to It's a
mix of he's trying to like prove that, you know,
he's trying to make arguments about like what's happening, you know,
in various overseas conflicts using a US intel, But he's

(23:10):
also just like spreading different kind of conspiracy theories that
he has to these kids who are by and large
looking up to him. There's a couple like the Washington
Post has done some really deep reporting where they talk
to some of these kids where they're like, yeah, man,
we loved him. Like when you realize this shit had
broken containment, he like called us and we were all

(23:30):
crying because we knew he was going to go to prison.
Like there they seem legitimately distraught. Yeah, there's like lines
like he said something had happened and he prayed to
God that this event would not happen, but now it's
in God's hands. Like these are like weirdo, ashy kids
I hesitate to, like condemn like the literal children too

(23:52):
much because they're very vulnerable. This guy is like, this
guy is a bad person who is deep, like in
a very fucked up way, influencing this group of like
thirty ish teenagers on the internet in his like weird politics.
It's not great. Now, that's separate from the question of,
like is there a value to these leagues, which we

(24:14):
can talk about in a little bit. But so as
we've talked about, Eric Tohler tracks down where this is happening,
tracks down like the name og publishes a piece on
Belling Cat. It's sort of ripped off by like, I
don't know, it does like every other newspaper in the world,
and then additional reporting is done. Belling Cat and the

(24:34):
New York Times team up and they eventually like track
down and publish an article on who this guy is
an airman named Jack Tik Sarah, And they publish an
article about that about a day before this guy gets
arrested by the FBI. And it's one of those things,

(24:55):
one of the if you look at the FBI Affi David,
it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this
guy down and found him because they did so you know,
using the resources they had before The Times did online.
People have been going after The Times and Eric for
like revealing this guy to the government, which is not
the case. Basically, once it became clear what had gotten leaked,

(25:18):
the FBI, because they had access to you know, the
systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive
compartmented information, found out who had most recently, like on
the days that kind of correspond to the leaks, pulled
up information about that and narrowed it down to this
guy Jack, and they had access to Like one of

(25:43):
the things they did is they called Discord and talked
to Discord, and Discord helped them track down where the
leaks were originating from. And then because they could see
that the account that had posted you know, the top
secret data originally was a paid account, they were able
to like provide the FBI with this guy's home, a
dress and shit. This is exactly what you'd expect for
the f.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, I mean, the FBI has a lot of non
open source means to do this type of investigation.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, they are not doing what Eric is doing and
just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and
hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from,
Like they have they are the FBI, they have access
to other things, and.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
It's what you'd expect from discord too, right, Like they
will comply with whatever.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yes, they absolutely these are top secret that like if
they don't have a legal choice here, they're a gigantic company,
they're going to comply. So this is the kind of
thing where like one of the there's this big argument,
I don't even even though it's big, but there's definitely
like a weird chunk of the left that has like
leaned on because the right has immediately started calling this

(26:46):
guy a whistleblower, fucking Marjorie Taylor Green was like he's
a Christian and he's a leaker trying to expose crucial
details about our government, And no he wasn't. He was
like trying to fucking groom some teenagers and they posted
without as permission.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
And a lot of a lot of the more conspiracy
type stuff is like trying to call out like you know,
it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is
related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it
seem like the US is doing things that are wrong
and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much, and it kind

(27:23):
of it it plays into this weird, weird thing that
people have against the way Biden has been handling the
geopolitics around the Russian invasion, and it's like it it
plays into a whole bunch of right when you're talking
points we've seen around Russia.

Speaker 4 (27:38):
You know, we've seen this.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
Type of stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often.

Speaker 4 (27:43):
There' there's a there's a whole bunch.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Of like little nodes that this that that this touches on,
and we even see we even see stuff like that
among like you know people who are authoritarian communists, right,
who are who are still pro Russia despite Russia not
being a communist country, but still like being like oh there,
you know, this is something he's trying to expose the

(28:06):
things that are people are doing wrong to Russia.

Speaker 4 (28:09):
And it's like okay, all right.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, yeah, and to me it's one of them. And
there's also you've gotten among some chunks of this attitude
that like well, you know, I don't care why he
did it or like what he is in his personal life.
Any leak you know of the US military machine is
good and should be you know protected. And it's like,
for one thing, this guy like nobody knew where these
things were coming from. There was a vested need in

(28:32):
sort of figuring out what the origin point was, to
figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing,
I don't know, Man, you can argue about like what
point you know, the digging, whether or not, like the
it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source.
I would argue that, like people also have a right
to know if there's some sort of fucking like like

(28:54):
if the documents were fake or altered in some way,
there was a reason to be trying to figure out
the providence of this shit. But more to the point,
like I think it's good to have access to like
data from inside of our military. I think that's that's
broadly positive. And when I look at these data, or
when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think
most of it's you know, one of the concerns that's

(29:16):
always that always exist when you're talking about a leak
of data is like, is this going to expose like
potentially innocent people to any kind of harm. And there
is a potential for that with some of this, because
some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the
upcoming offensive, and like, well, like I don't really care
if some guy inside the Kremlin who's like a member

(29:37):
of the Russian General Staff and a double I don't
care if that guy, like something bad happens to him.
He's probably not a great dude. But I do care
about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldiers potentially getting harmed. Now,
I will say, from what I can tell from this,
I think the odds of that are pretty low. It
looks like this has impacted kind of the timetable for

(29:57):
the counter offensive, but I don't know that it's I
haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed things in a
way that's like going to cause loss of life, although
it's a little bit unclears to whether that not that
might happen. But also while I think it's accurate to say,
I'm not saying evidence that like a lot of people's
safety have been harmed by these leaks, it's also not

(30:18):
you know, it's not anything like what Snowden did or
what Manning did. Right again, Manning revealed you know, videos
like the Collateral murder video, evidence of like breakdowns of
order and things that I think are accurate to call
war crimes that were being kind of hidden by our government.
Whereas Snowden revealed intense details about an n Essay spying program,

(30:41):
all of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most
of this is just kind of like wonky inside baseball
military stuff, which again I'm not like sad that it's
gotten out, but it's also not It really does seem
like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled
out based on his own kind of like weird interest.

(31:02):
It's not there's not like a strong unifying theme around them.
And again, most of it's most of its shit that's
not going to be interesting to the average person. One
of the documents I just read an article about because like,
we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now,
right there's been there's like the Post in the Time
seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked,
but they haven't published anything because you know they're reading

(31:24):
through it and you know, actually reporting it out. One
of the articles that just came out was about the
fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish
led self administration in in northern northeast Syria to Rojaba
to the SDF in order to talk about the potential
for them attacking Russian assets in elsewhere in Syria. When

(31:48):
this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter, it's
often been like described as, oh, the Ukrainians were going
to team up with the Courage to attack Russia in Syria,
like like this was an actual like Siria plan would
actually set the document. It seems a lot less inciting
than that. Basically, what happened was some folks on the
Ukrainian General staff or whatever were like looking into the possibility, Hey,

(32:12):
you know, is there any way that we could kind
of anything we could pay the Kurds over in Syria
to carry out an attack on the Russians. And apparently
they had access to somebody who claimed to be in
the SDF at least, and that person was like, we
might be able to do something if you can get
us some anti air defenses, right, which I don't know
how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful anti air defenses to

(32:34):
northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered on all sides. There
is some stuff. If you're a walk in the region,
there's some interesting stuff about this, which is that the
SDF basically responded, like, we could potentially do this, we
couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of
the self administration. Russians are acting as peacekeepers there between
Turkey and you know, it's kind of desire to invade

(32:58):
the entire region. They're not great as peacekeepers. The Armenians
will tell you that Russian soldiers are not great, great givers.
But the SDF didn't want to, like shit where they
were eating, right, so there was some debate about where
they might be able to attack. One of the things
that is really interesting about this week is that apparently
Ukraine like talk to Turkey about this, because obviously the

(33:18):
Turks consider the core of the SDF the YPG to
be a terrorist organization. But when Ukraine was talking to them,
they're like, hey, we might basically bribe these people to
carry out an attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria.
Turkey was like, okay, well, don't do it here or
here here, because that's kind of close to some our
guys might like that. That party is interesting. But again,

(33:40):
none of this matters all that much because nothing happened
as far as we know in December, Zelenski was like, no,
don't proceed with looking into this. This is the kind
of thing like the US military has, like plans for
what happens if we have to fight Canada. This is
the kind of thing defense departments do. And as far
as I can tell, there's there's no evidence that went

(34:00):
much for them, like a series of phone calls right which,
by the way, the SDF denies ever happened. I don't
know what exactly occurred. I don't know if it's hard
for me to tell. Did the Ukrainians were they talking
to someone who is actually a representative of the sdfs
like military hierarchy, or was this like some guy that
they thought was because maybe Ukraine doesn't have great context
into the air like or did the US. And it's

(34:23):
it's not kind of clear. Did the US maybe like
hook them up with somebody, but it doesn't like at
the at the end of the day, you can argue,
as someone who follows the region, I find this kind
of interesting. It's not exactly like groundbreaking, you know, in
its importance, because nothing happened, no one did anything. This
is like some guys in Ukraine thought about doing a

(34:44):
thing and then decided not to, which is, you know,
potentially interesting context, but we're not talking about the manning
or the snowed in lakes here.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's that particular document I think
is kind of clearly they have access to people who
have formally fought in Syria with the YPG right there.

Speaker 6 (35:04):
There are probably.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Dozens of them now fighting in Ukraine without a volunteer units.
Like it's it's not hard to see how this thought
came up. But like you said, nothing really happened. It
was just some people like spitboarling.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
So I don't know. There's some other like bits and
stuff in here that are kind of interesting. One of
them was there was a document in there about how
the US had kind of like interfered in peace negotiations
in Yemen due to like kind of concerns that they
had about the fact that China was kind of brokering
a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels in between

(35:48):
the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat
shady shit from the US in there, but at the
end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations.
It's just like, yeah, they were like like like and
a lot of it's like that where it's kind of like,
this is useful context. I'm glad historians or journalists reporting
it out will have that. But at the end of
the day, like the fact that like, oh hey, at

(36:10):
one point in these peace negotiations the US was like,
you know, being being kind of a kind of a
dick isn't exactly like shocking. You know, It's not going
to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there.
It's not stuff that like is most of it's not
stuff that's like massively important important. It is really interesting

(36:32):
that the detail that our defense establishment apparently has from
within the Russian government. I do think it's worth noting
because we're talking, like when we talk about sort of
the provenance of these and the reliability of these leaks
as they regard the war in Ukraine, there's been a
lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals that like

(36:53):
the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry out a
counter offensive, or that the war's gone much worse for
them than they think. It is kind of worth noting that, like,
prior to the expanded Russian invasion, all US military intelligence
suggested that the Ukrainian government was going to fold in
a matter of days. So even though a lot of

(37:14):
this is top secret info, that doesn't mean it's like
one hundred percent accurate. Right Like our guys, like think
back to the Iraq War, our dudes get shipped round constantly.
It is again, this is all really interesting. And I
will say two things. I think it's very funny that
this guy nuked his entire life basically to impress children

(37:37):
on a discord. I think it's extremely funny. I have
laughed many a time at this. I also think it's like, like,
as someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting that
and good that we have this context. I don't think
any of this is like massively surprising or shocking, Like
the shit that's in that defense industry or a defense

(37:57):
intelligence agency analysis of the Ukrainian position right now is
like stuff that you would know if you were paying
attention to the good ocent aggregators who have been covering
the war, and if you've been like just reading good
reporting on what's going on over there. I'll read a
little bit of a summary from an article that's kind
of going over some of the other stuff that appears

(38:19):
to have been leaked. One details information apparently obtained through
US eavesdropping on Russia's Foreign intelligence service and suggests that
China approved the provision of lethal aid to Russia and
its war in Ukraine early this year and plan to
disguise its military equipment as civilian items. Another includes details
of a conducted by Beijing on one of its advanced
experimental missiles, the DF twenty seven hypersonic light vehicle, on

(38:41):
February twenty fifth. It says the vehicle flew for twelve
minutes across thirteen hundred miles and that it possessed a
high probability of penetrating US ballistic missile defense systems. The
documents contain new details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed
Killeen twenty three by US intelligence agencies, that earlier this
year flew over the United States. They detail sophisticated so
aalen's equipment. US intelligence agencies were aware of up to

(39:02):
four additional Chinese bi balloons. The documents a and another
previously unreported revelation, and so let's let's kind of break
that down. One thing we have here is a basically
an argument through from the US that based on their intercepts.
They believe that China has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry
to Russia and disguising it as civilian items. That doesn't

(39:27):
mean they have done this. It means that, like there's
sigent that someone in our government has that says that
they were. That could be disinformation from them. It could
be out of date, it could be something like with
this Ukraine and Syria thing that they talked about doing
and then didn't do. It's interesting, I would say, if
you are a defense industry reporter, it's something that would

(39:48):
could should definitely spur you to further reporting because like
that's really relevant if that's occurring. But it's not the
final word on the matter. Meanwhile, you've got this thing
on like, yeah, this hype masonic missile the Chinese had
is good at shooting shit. Theoretically, this is, you know,
the kind of thing that's that's interesting and I think

(40:09):
is probably more accurate than you know, talking about the
China providing lethal aid because you can kind of you know,
theoretically you're looking at actual like data on how the
missile has performed. It just seems like it's something that
you've got more fidelity on But this is again to
kind of contrast it with like the snowed and Manning leaks. Well,

(40:30):
what do you what do you do if like the
NSSAY is spying on people, Well, you could at least
attempt to pass laws that restrict their ability to do that. Right,
What do you do if there have been like war
crimes committed by your military that were then cover it up, Well,
you can at least attempt to prosecute people. What do
you do if some other countries got a better missile? Well,
there's not a whole lot for you to do sitting

(40:53):
at home and like New York City or you know,
fucking Austin, Texas, Right, Like, like, what are we to
do about China's hyper I don't know. My assumption generally speaking,
not that this is an interesting but my assumption generally
speaking is that when you're talking about Russia, China, the
United States, we can all murder each other if we
wanted to write like, we've all got real nice missiles

(41:15):
at this point, and it's this, you know, the Chinese
by balloon stuff is like interesting. I don't think anyone's
surprised by this, Like we knew there was a spy balloon.
I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique. It's again, it's
interesting that there were four other spy balloons in the area.
But we simply know from older reporting that this happened
like three or four times while Trump was in office too,

(41:36):
So like, yeah, this is something we've known about. There's
been reporting about. This is corroboration. That's interesting. Again, none
of this is really like a sea change in our
understanding of any of these conflicts. It is interesting context.
Some of it's being blown up, you know, into stuff
that it isn't. There's reporting and like the number of
US servicemen in Ukraine that's being like spun is like

(41:57):
we've got boots on the ground there and it's like,
well they're like the seaguards and stuff. There's like twenty
nine dudes that this like confirmed. Michael, Yeah, yeah, this
confirms there's not a lot of US guys on the
ground there.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
You send a lot of people when we when we're
doing wars. But yeah, like every embassy in the world
has a contingent of marines who make sure that it
doesn't just get Yeah. I don't want to say bang ghazied, but.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
H yeah, yeah, you know, big Ghazzi.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, that's fine, and this is not new news to
anyone who's been paying attention. But if you are Michael Tracy,
this is brain melting shit.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
Michael Tracy is a weirdo quasi left journalist who like
early on in the war, he didn't want to go
into Ukraine very much, but he like hung out in
Poland and took pictures of like US soldiers and like
a facility that they were had been in for years,
and was like, look, you know, this is evidence of
the secret US support. And it's like, guys, I mean,

(42:54):
for one thing, like look at this, Look at how
much shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to
impress children. If there were like like secret massive formations
of US troops or even large like forces of US
specops guys carrying out operations in Ukraine, how good do
you think they'd be at keeping that shit secret?

Speaker 6 (43:13):
Right?

Speaker 1 (43:14):
For one thing, like Special Forces guys get killed all
the fucking time, Like they get killed, they get overrun,
like like's it's a terrible risk for US to just
like send Seal Team six in to fight the Russians
when spoilers the Ukrainians have really good special forces guys
every bit as good as ours actually, with a lot
of cases more experience fighting this kind of war. And

(43:36):
we're given and it's like, if you want to talk
about US involvement, we're giving them their weapons. Like we're
involved fucking plenty. There's just not much of a point
in US like sending the green fucking berets into Bakamut, right,
Like why that doesn't That doesn't help us at all,
That doesn't like help our government. That's not like good

(43:56):
for the military. It would be stupid anyway, whatever, anything
else to talk about here?

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Do we want to talk about the Israel one?

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Oh? Yeah, no, this is one of the interest although
it's not. Again, basically one of the things that leaked
is like the US is spying on all of its allies,
which this leaks every couple of years. We're always spying
on our allies, including Israel. Israel has spied on US
a bunch. That's why they have nuclear weapons. Yeah, James,
you want to talk about this?

Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, So this is a document that basically what it
alleges is that what has been alleged, perhaps incorrectly, is
that it was encouraging Mossad staff to attend protests against
net Yahoo when he was attempting his like auto goldpe,
like his coup from within, whatever you want to call that, right,

(44:48):
he was attempting to centralized power, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now it's a leaked like you said, it's a document.
It says that I'm quoting from it or from reporting
on it. At least senior leaders of the Mossad spy
service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest
the new Israeli governments proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit

(45:11):
calls to action that decried the Israeli government, according to
Singet Signals Intelligence the Infamy. So actually Netanyahu himself has
been asked about this, and it's worth he appointed the
Mossad director, a guy called David I think it's by Neya,
and he has also us He's on the record previously

(45:35):
in news media before this saying that he had clarified
to Mosad personnel who could attend protests and who could
not attend, like because at a certain point in any
of these things that you're not allowed to be explicitly political, right,
and folks, even at a very low point in the
US military that you're not supposed to say and do

(45:56):
certain things. So, uh, there was a petition that went
out earlier, and again this has already been reported. They
that were sent by intelligence offices basically saying like, we'll
go on strike. And there had been again like widely
reported instances other Israeli military people saying that they would

(46:19):
go on strike or not shot up for work if
these judicial reforms went ahead. So I think again it's
been kind of we've really stretched. What was interesting I
thought was that it had a Feiser label on fire
series to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and if people aren't familiar,

(46:41):
basically it allows US intelligence to wire tap things, which
they can do it without warrant if it doesn't include
a US person. So a US person is not just
a citizen but also maybe a permanent resident something like that, right,
like a person who has more rights than others in
the United States. But in this case they seem to

(47:04):
have got a fis a warrant, which it's very easy
to get.

Speaker 6 (47:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
It's like a closed courtroom procedure where they go to
a judge and like it's not like an adversarial argument.
Now's there's no one who argues that you should get
the warrant, and so in practice they really always get
these warrants. But what it showed they have to just
prove its intelligence asset of a foreign power, and so

(47:29):
it showed that at some point they went for a
judge and said like, hey, you know, we need to
wiretap some kind of some kind of communications or I'm
using wiretap in the broad sense, right specific sense. But
it's interesting I think that that they have some intelligence
asset in the United States and said, hey, we know

(47:49):
this an Israeli intelligence asset, and to be clear that
this could just be shit that's going in and out
of the embassy, and they've decided that that they needed
to wire that and keep an eye on that. Now,
given given that like it's Rail's foreign policies has been
talking terrible for decades, but nettan Yahoo is a new

(48:09):
degree of crazy. Uh, it is it's unsurprising that like
anyone concerned with I guess international relations would would want
to know more about what, yeah, is going on.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
And again like that's it's interesting context. As you noted,
a lot of this had been reported out previously, so yeah,
we're it's it's just like it's it's it's all interesting again.
I'm my, my, my. My attitude here is like I'm
glad this information is out and I don't really care
what happens to Jack techsi Era. Like, yeah, in my

(48:44):
in my ideal world, the policing infrastructure that's come down
on this kid would not exist. But he made this
decision knowing full well what happens when you leak top
se Like it's one of those things where it's like,
just just within the context of shit that's fucked up
in our country. The thing I'm going to be upset

(49:05):
about is not a kid leaking top secret info to
win an online argument and then having it blow up
on him, right, Like, especially not a kid who's a
fucking Nazi. At the end of the day, he did
something that was obviously done. It's like if some guy
hops on Twitter under his real name and starts posting
pictures of heroin and saying, hey, guys, this is my

(49:27):
name and address. I'm selling hella heroin. Here's photos of
a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well, I think
heroin should be legal, but I'm not gonna like, I'm
not gonna like make a crusade out of that guy's arrest,
because that's stupid. Like, you know what happens if you post, Hey,
here is my at home address and name. Here is
all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah, you'll probably get

(49:50):
in trouble because you have posted online a serious crime.
Obviously that could be a problem for you. That's just
not my primary concern in the world when people do
really stupid shit and it blows up on them, and
it's like again, leakers, you look at the way Manning proceeded,
You look at the way Snowden proceeded. They were aware

(50:11):
of the danger of what they were doing. I mean,
you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison. Snowden fled
the country.

Speaker 7 (50:18):
That's there because they were whistleblowers. They under they under
they understood this is a serious like this is very illegal,
and I have to try to take steps to protect
myself because the government's going to come after me. The
thing about Jack is like just the level of like
arrogance that like I can post this shit all day
long and nothing will happen. It was like, well, for

(50:39):
one thing, this is never going like it's information you're
posting online, Like I don't care. There's no way to
keep stuff completely contained within a thirty person discord. It's
going to leak out, and when it is, the government's
gonna want to know who the fuck is leaking this ship.
And you took like took pictures of this shit inside
his home, like it's just dumb. I'm not gonna like.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
I don't at the end of the day, I have
no room in my sympathy for like a a fucking
fascy kid who committed the dumbest crime possible and got
in trouble. Like I don't know, there's there's people who
I don't know. For example, we're camping in a forest
and are getting charged with terrorism and facing longer penalties. Right,
Jack might do fifteen years at the most, which is

(51:23):
like fucked up, I guess, But you know, there's people
facing a lot worse for a lot less and I just,
you know, whatever, I don't care what happens to this kid.
He seems like he sucks. I think the leaks are interesting.
There's nothing in here that's like fundamentally changed my understanding
of geopolitics, though, Yeah, that's where I am.

Speaker 6 (51:46):
I would agree.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
It is a useful reminder to keep your crime offline.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
Yeah, don't continue, continue to not post crimes on the internet. Again.
If you're selling Heroin, don't post on Twitter. Here is
my name and home address. Anyone want to buy some
fucking China white, that's not a great idea.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
If anyone has any top secret documents, you can find
me on the Star Wars the Old Republic forums.

Speaker 4 (52:13):
Just just post, just post them there.

Speaker 3 (52:15):
Yeah, I am part of the Jedi Initiative program, so
just locate that and it'll be you.

Speaker 4 (52:21):
I'm sure, I'm sure I'll see it.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
Yeah, I am on the the the NOZDRMO server on
World of Warcraft. You can just hit me up under
my uh my given name. Just d M me and
we'll figure it out. You can send that ship to
me over AOL instant messenger. That's how I take all
of my leaks. Some secure platform.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
You can find me in a Mountain Project comments section
where only good things happen.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
So we're all on war Thunder too, so you can
get there too for work reasons.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Yeah, I'll be shipped talking your your grading problem, but
also accepting national security leaks.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Yeah, we do, we do it all, all right, everybody.
That's an episode.

Speaker 4 (53:07):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 4 (53:24):
Thanks for listening.