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On Apr. 7, news broke that a number of highly classified intelligence documents from the United States had been leaked, and were for a time widely available on Discord chat server for the game Minecraft.
Real, but altered
The U.S. government has deemed the leak to be highly significant, saying it represents a major intelligence breach.
According to the New York Times, U.S. officials have confirmed that the leak is real, but that some of the documents appear to be altered.
The most significant information leaked appears to be about the war in Ukraine, where the U.S. is providing significant amounts of military and intelligence support to Ukraine.
While the information does not change much about what is generally known, there are specific details that might be of note, such as the Ukrainian air defence systems being critically short of ammunition or details related to a purported upcoming Ukrainian counter-offensive.
The NYT also said that the the leaks showed that U.S. penetration of Russia's security and intelligence services was so successful that they appeared to be better informed about Russian military operations than Ukrainian.
The leaks also contain information related to a wide array of information on countries other than Ukraine and Russia, including U.S. allies Israel and South Korea.
For example, the leaks appeared to reveal deliberations by the South Korean government on whether to sell ammunition to the U.S., for fear it would be used in Ukraine against Russian forces.
Blockheads
Reuters further reported that while the leak was real, some details had been altered, such as reported Russian casualty estimates in Ukraine appearing to have been downplayed.
Reuters cited two U.S. officials as saying that the documents may have been altered to hide who leaked them, or for misinformation purposes.
Portions of the documents had been circulating on various social media platforms for weeks, but was only officially confirmed as leak on Apr. 7.
The Wall Street Journal says that the documents, numbering in hundreds, seem to have been uploaded to a Minecraft Discord server between January and March of 2023.
Minecraft is a popular online game, and its gameplay revolves around elaborate virtual constructions using construction materials represented as blocks. Discord is a service that allows users to chat or share media in a gaming community.
Open source intelligence group Bellingcat apparently tracked the source of the leak to the server, and its founder cast doubt that the documents were part of a "Russian op", attributing the leak to the discord server to a "few internet weirdos" who were "terminally online".
According to gaming news site Kotaku, who viewed the remains of partially deleted chat logs, the information appears to have emerged during an argument about the Russian invasion of Ukraine when a user posted the leaked documents to prove that the war was "real".
Repercussions
One of the worries regarding the leak is the doubt it puts in the minds of key US allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and perhaps even Ukraine, and whether it might affect what information they considering sharing with the U.S.
However according to The Wall Street Journal because the documents appear to have been printed, and given that classified documents in the U.S. can only be printed from approved systems, it appears that the leaker should be able to be tracked.
The NYT backs up the idea that the documents were not obtained by a hack, saying that the documents appeared to look like "hastily taken photographs of pieces of paper", and that material appeared to have been "folded up, placed in a pocket", and then removed from "a secure area to be photographed".
Reuters reports that the documents appeared to have not been recent, and that investigators were look at a number of theories, including a disgruntled employees or an insider actively attempting to undermine U.S. security.
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Top image by Unsplash & Minecraft/YouTube