The intriguing role of Discord in the intelligence leaks

The US intelligence leaks that had taken place for over a week now, embarrassed the US Defence Department as well as US allies like South Korea, Israel and many others. But how the classified information was leaked remains a mystery, and it seems that there is no Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame or Edward Snowden, an intelligence consultant, while on a contract with the US government in Afghanistan, who let many a cat out of the bag as it were. But this time round, it remains a mystery how the classified documents appeared on social media, and they remained there for a month or two before the traditional media caught on to it, and turned into a big story.

This raises many questions which should be causing sleepless nights to those who manage intelligence agencies in various countries and who are tasked to keep the sensitive information they gather as a top secret for a long enough time. So, the Pentagon is stumped at the latest round of leaked information. According to open source investigation site Bellingcat, the leaked documents can be traced to the social media platform Discord, a gaming site which was established in a San Francisco-based site which was set up in 2015 by computer programmer Jason Citron to connect people, either as individuals or as groups with a common interest like a game or a subject. During the COVID-19 interruption, the site gained unprecedented popularity.

It is in one of the chat rooms discussing the war in Ukraine, that some of the documents surfaced. And the US Defence Department is puzzled as to how the classified documents ended up online. Says American Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at a news conference on Tuesday, “They were somewhere in the web, and where exactly, and who had access at the point, we don’t know, we simply don’t know.” And American officials cautioned that some of the documents were doctored.

Discord’s company statement said, “As this remains an active investigation, we cannot provide further comment at this time.” There is evidence to show that Discord has been used by individuals and groups with far-right leanings and views earlier. In 2017, white supremacists used it for their rally in Charlottesville. And in May, 2022, a teenager put up racist memes on Discord before he went and shot 10 people dead in Buffalo in the US. Many of the intelligence documents that got leaked contained labels like NOFORN or “not releasable to foreign nationals”, which meant foreign intelligence agencies. And most of these documents were in a format used to brief military commanders. It is clear that the documents were taken out by as yet undetected individuals, who then put them on the social media platform.

So, it is a human source that caused the leak. It did not happen because the documents and information were hacked by outsiders and the hackers gained illegitimate access to the documents. And neither is it the case that some bug or virus infected the files and they spread quickly on the social media. It is possible that intelligence that is gathered is stored in computer files that had developed a malfunction. It is the case when files get corrupted due to a malfunction or through malware, the information becomes gibberish and it is a difficult task debugging the files. But in the present instance, the leaked documents make sense and there is no corruption. It can only mean that the leak is indeed an insider’s job. And when information is digitised, it is in the safekeeping of the maintenance staff of the databases. When a leak takes place, the problem is to be traced to the computer technicians who are in charge of the digitising process.