Discord
Twitter Suspends User For Sharing Washington Post Story About Pentagon Docs Leaker
from the impossibility-theory-all-over-again dept
You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as some questions about the story itself, Twitter made the (ultimately unwise and mistaken) decision to block links to that story, and (in some cases) to suspend accounts that were sharing it. A day later, the company admitted this was a mistake and changed its policy.
As we’ve explained at great length, the conspiracy stories that came out of this one incident are ridiculous and out of touch with reality. The company made one dumb move, which (despite what you might have heard) was not pushed on them by the government or the Biden campaign (which was not the government). They corrected it relatively quickly. This is the nature of content moderation. Mistakes will be made.
Yet, the conspiracy theories continue to spread, and even Elon Musk (the now owner of Twitter) has bought into many of them, and has even suggested that this was some of the reason he chose to purchase Twitter, as right after the announced purchase, he declared that it was “obviously incredibly inappropriate” for Twitter to have done that to “a major news organization.”
Leaving aside that Musk’s own Twitter also blocked the NY Post incorrectly just recently, it appears that it is also somewhat aggressively blocking links to certain other news stories as well.
You’ve likely heard about recent leaks of Pentagon documents that were first leaked via a Discord server. On Wednesday, the Washington Post’s Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford broke quite a story about where the documents came from, discussing the small, private Discord group, and the guy who operated it, who apparently went to great lengths to leak these classified documents.
The young member read OG’s message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed hespent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on governmentcomputer networks or spooling out from printers. He annotated some of the hand-typed documents, the member said, translating arcane intel-speak for the uninitiated, such as explaining that“NOFORN” meant the information in the document was so sensitive it must not be shared with foreign nationals.
OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watchedmovies together, joked around and prayed.But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.
This is pretty good reporting, and on Thursday, the FBI arrested someone that they allege was the leaker described in the article.
Glenn Greenwald, who appears to have an incredibly warped view of what journalism is, freaked out that the Washington Post would report on what it had turned up about the leaker claiming it was doing “the job of the US Security State by hunting down its leakers.” But, uh, that makes zero sense. It’s one thing for a journalist to protect whistleblowers/leakers who come to those journalists to share documents. It’s another altogether to say journalists should not try to report the story of who was sharing classified documents in a gamer Discord server for clout, not as a whistleblower or anything like that.
But, of course, Elon agreed with Glenn, because that’s what he does these days.
Reporting on someone leaking information is kind of a thing that reporters do. Glenn wrote an entire book about Ed Snowden, after all. Yes, it’s different in that Snowden went to Glenn with his docs, but it’s still a reporter’s job to report on stuff like this.
Anyhow, all that is lead up to the fact that Twitter now appears to be permanently suspending at least some accounts that have shared the Washington Post story.
Professor Kathy Gill explained that she attempted to share that story on Twitter with a screenshot of the headline with an annotation noting that it was a teenager who told the story to the WaPo reporters. It didn’t work. She received a message saying “Tweet not sent” instead.
When it didn’t work a second time, she “appealed” to Twitter, noting that it was just a link to the story and a screenshot of the headline:
And, in response: her account was suspended permanently.
Very free speechy from the free speech king.
It’s unclear exactly why Kathy’s account was suspended. It’s difficult to see what rules were broken here, and when the dude in charge insists that blocking major media organizations is “obviously incredibly inappropriate” you kinda have to wonder.
I mean, the reality is that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and mistakes are made. This seems likely to be a mistake. But since the supporters of Elon seem to think that you can judge the entire management based on just one such mistake, even to the point of launching congressional inquiries… it seems worth noting this particular bit of content moderation.
Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, journalism, kathy gill, link sharing, news
Companies: twitter
National Guardsman Arrested For Leaking Top Secret Ukraine War Documents On Discord
from the who-could-have-possibly-seen-this-coming dept
So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located.
The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on top of a hunting magazine. I mean, that narrows it down to people who still buy stuff printed on physical media, a number that shrinks exponentially by the day.
On top of that, the entry level for the leaked info — much of it related to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia — was Discord, which no one has considered to be the equivalent of Signal or any other secure site for the dissemination of sensitive material. . ." READ MORE
Why Discord is at the heart of a major US intelligence leak
The classified military documents originated on Discord before spreading elsewhere on social media
"A military intelligence breach is being blamed on users of popular gaming platform Discord, after classified documents were uploaded there and disseminated widely across the internet. The person who allegedly uploaded those sensitive materials has since been identified, in part thanks to another gaming platform, Steam, and arrested under the Espionage Act.
The FBI arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira on Thursday in connection to an investigation into the leak of classified military documents that spread on social media earlier in April. Teixeira is a United States guardsman with an intelligence division of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to the New York Times. He was charged in Boston on Friday with two counts in violation of the Espionage Act: the unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. Teixeira could face up to 15 years in prison, the BBC reported.
Teixeira allegedly published snapshots of printed classified briefings on a small Discord server called Thug Shaker Central, where roughly two dozen members, including teenagers, posted racist memes and talked about guns and video games like Call of Duty and Halo, according to research and training director Aric Toler of investigative collective Bellingcat. (Toler said on Twitter that Teixera’s Steam account, which led to him being identified, showed Arma 3, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Garry’s Mod, Counter-Strike, and Hearts of Iron 4.)
U.S. government officials have confirmed the authenticity of the majority of the documents,
Those documents had been sitting on Discord for months, spread between a few different servers, Bellingcat reported earlier in April. Teixeira first published the documents on the small Thug Shaker Central server, according to the Washington Post, before a teenager in the group leaked them on a separate Discord server of a YouTube creator called wow_mao. Ten of those documents were also published on the Minecraft Earth Map server, where they spread to thousands of its members and, a month later, were discovered by the U.S. government through social media. The leak has thrust Discord, typically associated with gaming communities, into the spotlight.
WHAT DOES DISCORD HAVE TO DO WITH THE LEAK?
Discord as a company has very little, if anything, to do with this. People are free to create and operate Discord servers without permission from the company; people use the platform for a variety of reasons. Discord servers are social hubs often built around topics and people. Some people have Discord servers used solely to communicate with small groups of friends while playing video games. Other servers have thousands of members united around individual Twitch streamers or video games. . .
HOW DID AUTHORITIES FIND THE LEAKER?
We don’t yet know how the government found Teixeira, but the Times detailed the “trail of digital evidence” that linked the airman to the leaked documents. Many of the leaked documents were photographs of printed paper, and those often showed details in the background. The Times was able to find a Steam profile linked to Teixeira’s name; from there, it found an Instagram profile with photos of Teixeira’s childhood home. The countertop shown in the photographs matched the countertop the leaked documents were photographed on.
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Several members of the Thug Shaker Central Discord group spoke to the press, but both the Times and the Post said the members didn’t give up Teixeira’s name.
> New court documents said the FBI used billing records from Discord to find Teixeira, the Associated Press reported. The FBI got Teixeira’s Discord username from an unnamed source, the court documents said, which the person said started posting classified information around December. Teixeira’s name and address were both associated with his Discord account. The FBI arrested Teixeira on Thursday at a home in North Dighton, Massachusetts. He was arraigned in court the following day in Boston.
HAS THIS HAPPENED BEFORE?
This is not the first time that government military secrets have been leaked on gaming forums. In fact, fans of the free-to-play combat simulator War Thunder are known for this, specifically for leaking information to win arguments between players. In January, a War Thunder player posted a user manual for an F-16A fighter jet called the Fighting Falcon, a model that had just been added to the game. A day after, someone posted restricted information on the McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet. Last year, a user posted official documents relating to a Chinese anti-tank weapon. Before that, it was the United Kingdom’s Challenger 2 battle tank that was leaked, followed by the French Leclerc battle tank. . ." READ MORE
