User Panel
Originally Posted By Capta: TY! Need to round some some M7 Bayonets. Like I said my biggest change would ideally be a Micro RDS. After that I think you could find a lighter rail. The Midwest nightfighter rail is pretty stoutly made and the barrel nut is like 2.5” long. Also pretty affordable compared to some options. I’m not in a position to say that it’s objectively better than a lighter rail for LAM mounting. However even a somewhat heavy rail the rifle is fairly lightweight with a T2. Very nice handing, but somewhat muzzle-heavy. I think irons are the right choice for the situation. The only way I would go no irons is with an ACOG/RDS combo. Had a long phone conversation with the program rep and I will be moving forward. Later tonight or maybe tomorrow I’ll put together a summary and will begin contacting interested persons with all the information for them to decide for themselves. View Quote @Capta Count me as interested in that info as well, please. *As long as there is a valid export license* then this could be a good thing. |
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Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Seemed like a cool way to make a ships 5"/127mm gun a lot more viable. Those little guided glide shells might not bust a warship, but would work great for disabling blockade running containerships (shot to the bridge?) or disable some of the 'maritime militia' boats China uses. Or just be used as filler to overwhelm enemy air defenses. View Quote Can anyone explain why the Navy doesn't use 155mm guns? |
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"I do believe that some gun laws are needed and yes, I am a Republican" ~ tc556guy - NRA Member
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Originally Posted By ERNURSE: I said over a month ago, If not Bakhmut then where. I believe the defenders of Bakhmut will go down in history as those warriors who held the line and gave Ukraine the time to equip themselves with western weapons and troops trained to use them. They have bled the enemy very well and have lost alot themselves. Much as the defenders at Astovol steel plant. Sometimes you just have to hold. There is so much going on that we do not know. All the talk of the spring offensive, kinda like death or the return of Christ...No man knows the hour, and those that say they do are leading you away. I personally believe the "leaked documents" are alot of BS, otherwise our 3 letter agencies would have hung someone out to dry, let alone the true and righteous anger and fury of Ukraine, They would have let the world know who it was. The studies and books that will be written will throw alot of us upside down when really learn the truth. Its amazing watching the world hang on every bit of disinformation. The Ukes have become masters of disinformation and with our help , are shaping the next battlefields. Already so much that we thought of the mighty soviet army has turned out to be crap, I personally hope that there are real War Crime trials and punishments, Orcs who rape, steal, kill and behead people need to pay. View Quote Preferably in another Nuremburg style venue, but just as well if not. I would recommend that everybody keep well clear of places where wealthy Russians congregate. |
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Originally Posted By j_hooker: Thanks and I appreciate the explanation View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By j_hooker: Originally Posted By voyager3: Originally Posted By j_hooker: I hear a lot of Russians say “Souka”, when something happens. What does it mean? Literally it means "bitch" but it is often used simply as parasitic swear word like f*ck in English by people not good at forming long coherent phrases. Because of the Cyrillic spelling "сука", you may have seen the more emphatic curse written as "cyka blyat". Thanks and I appreciate the explanation I've also noticed that Ukraïnians will use it on occasion. Here's some ProBass featuring the lyric "Welcome to Ukraine, сука!" The song title is "Do Boyu" which translates as "To The Battle" Failed To Load Title |
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Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Russia jamming U.S. smart bombs in Ukraine, leaked docs say A separate technical problem, since fixed, had been causing the munitions to fail. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/12/russia-jamming-u-s-smart-bombs-in-ukraine-leaked-docs-say-00091600 American-made smart bombs are falling victim to Russian electronic jamming in Ukraine, causing them to miss their targets, according to leaked documents and confirmed by a Defense Department official. In some cases, the weapons were also failing to detonate due to a technical issue, which Ukrainian troops have since addressed. The Pentagon in December began sending Kyiv advanced equipment that could convert unguided air-dropped munitions into precision-guided “smart bombs” that can hit Russian targets with a higher degree of accuracy. The guided bombs can be launched by a variety of aircraft such as bombers and fighters, and are called Joint Direct Attack Munitions or JDAMs. The longer-range version being sent to Ukraine is called a JDAM-Extended Range, or JDAM-ER. But the weapons have experienced higher-than-expected dud rates and have missed their targets on the battlefield, according to a leaked slide prepared by the Joint Staff and confirmed by a U.S. official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. In some cases, the bomb fuzes were not arming when they were released, causing the weapon to fail to detonate. The Ukrainian air force put in place a fix to ensure the bombs are arming correctly, according to the slide and the official. A larger problem is that Russia is using GPS jamming to interfere with the weapons’ targeting process, according to the slide and a separate person familiar with the issue who’s not in the U.S. government. American officials believe Russian jamming is causing the JDAMs, and at times other American weapons such as guided rockets, to miss their mark. “I do think there may be concern that the Russians may be jamming the signal used to direct the JDAMs, which would answer why these munitions are not performing in the manner expected and how they perform in other war zones,” said Mick Mulroy a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer. View Quote I'm skeptical. There were reports that Russia was supplying Iraq with jammers during OIF and they did nothing but tell our folks where to bomb to kill the jammers. Lots of variables to take into account like are these even the same tech, was the tech updated, JDAM now vs whatever munition used then, etc. but, massive grain of salt here given how lacking Russian wunder-weapons have been to date. U.S. Bombs GPS-Jamming Sites In Iraq, Possibly Sold by Russia Russian GPS Jammers Pose Little Threat In Iraq Also, just a friendly reminder that data in the leaks are probably best regarded as misinformation given the fact st least some data has already been acknowledged as fraudulent, even if the source of the leaks is authentic. |
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DeSantis 2024
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Originally Posted By fike: It’s interesting that all of the news stories coming out of “leaks” are all about failures of US systems, Ukrainian failures, and Russian successes. View Quote Attached File |
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DeSantis 2024
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Originally Posted By Chaingun: I and others keep hearing Blyat is Fuck. He says Blyat is Whore View Quote Blyat does mean "whore" literally. But when used as an expletive the correct translation would be "fuck!" or "shit!" since you don't yell "whore!" when you step on a Lego block. Literal word by word translation vs understanding context is the reason why the auto-translated texts look so stilted. |
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Originally Posted By Tiberius: All the prospective candidates, except Ukraine, are in both the EU and NATO. By establishing consensus amongst each other and voting as a Bloc, the will gain more influence in both together rather than they had separately. I wonder if that is why Macron and Schulz have been such bitches lately…..such an alliance is a direct threat to their rule of the EU. It should also be said they can’t trust Washington much more than Brussels. They need to have the ability to act without help from either, if not passive-aggressive opposition. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By Tiberius: Originally Posted By RockNwood: Originally Posted By Tiberius: Originally Posted By RockNwood: Originally Posted By ITCHY-FINGER: Originally Posted By Capta: I think you can make an argument for interests-driven decision making before the war. EU slow-rolling a nuke reactor but Russia agrees to help? OK fair enough. Wanting to keep Soros’ dirty mitts of their internal politics? OK, Poland has done the same and incurred some of the same grief over it. Poland has also done everything possible since to help Ukraine and cooperate with NATO. Turkey has played hardball over their political and financial interests too. But they have also provided quite significant military aid, a lot of it off the radar. They play hardball, they get (some of) what they want, and then they cooperate. Hungary continues to refuse aid, refuses even the transit of aid, and has repeatedly tried to block military and financial aid within the EU. I actually don’t have a problem with hardball quid pro quo politics. But we aren’t seeing that. We’re seeing obstructionism which is not tied to fulfillment of quid pro quo demands, and that raises pretty significant questions about Orban’s motives. I watch a fair amount of EU/NATO press content on youtube, and Stoltenberg recently made pretty clear reference to “getting Hungary’s concerns for minority rights addressed” or words to that effect. So NATO/the EU appears to be interested in playing ball with Orban for his domestic political goals. Will Orban reciprocate? I doubt it. I’m not well versed in the politics of Hungary’s nuke plant saga. However I read through this link and it certainly doesn’t paint a black and white picture of EU stonewalling/Russia helping. If anything it raises strong questions of Russia using both energy and money for political leverage against Hungary and Europe. Which of course is the same boat that Germany was in, but Germany has largely bailed out of that and Hungary…hasn’t. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/hungary.aspx I reject the idea that “Orban may just think that everything will back to normal in a few months.” Only an absolute moron would think that at this point, and Orban is not a moron. The escalation of Russian barbarism and war crimes and the demand for war crimes trials and reparations will prevent any rapprochement with Europe for years if not decades. We aren’t party to the reasoning behind a sanctions threat - yet. I agree. I think Orban has personal animosity towards Zelensky and maybe Ukraine in general on top of all the legitimate concerns Hungary has with the EU. Maybe he also assumed that a quick Russian victory would be followed by very favorable terms for the Hungarian minorities in Ukraine. As an ethnic Hungarian who supports Orban in domestic policies, I am very frustrated by his stupid games over Ukraine. Orban would have been wise to emulate the successes of Poland. Maybe piggyback off some of their moves. If independence is a high priority for them and being a small country nukes are a bad path. It is a wonderful baseline generation capability but the technology and fuel are highly controlled by larger countries. Also, large Nuke plants like the Russian ones are not the answer. If they pursue nuclear power the French approach if more numerous and smaller plants is much better. Located near the ME they could have multi-supplier options with natural gas. It is clean and the generation can be quickly ramped up or down to meet demand. Poland isn’t helping Ukraine to please Brussels, or Washington. They are doing it for their own reasons. Duda is a fan of Pilsudski’s Intermarium project, and a free and independent (and friendly) Ukraine is a core necessity for it, or something like it, to come to pass. By invading Ukraine, Putin literally dropped into Duda’s lap a once in a lifetime opportunity to turn Pilsudski’s dream into reality. He understood the gift he was given immediately and ran with it. If it works out, future generations of Poles will venerate him for engineering an alliance that will shut out Russia forever. The Three Seas or Intermarium alliance sounds much more practical for those in direct threat of Russia than EU or NATO. Then develop specific coordination agreements with NATO. Great to see they are already working toward this. All the prospective candidates, except Ukraine, are in both the EU and NATO. By establishing consensus amongst each other and voting as a Bloc, the will gain more influence in both together rather than they had separately. I wonder if that is why Macron and Schulz have been such bitches lately…..such an alliance is a direct threat to their rule of the EU. It should also be said they can’t trust Washington much more than Brussels. They need to have the ability to act without help from either, if not passive-aggressive opposition. Good insight. I agree working together is their best bet to weather the manipulations by various power plays from the west. I’ve never been to Eastern Europe but the people I have known from Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia are very solid good people of faith and good talent and skills. And the region has very rich history. I hope they can rebuild the greatness of Europe. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By m35ben: https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/390973/anon-D0BAD0BED0BDD182D0B0D0BAD182-1-7906-2780040.png View Quote You are finding some hilarious graphics, Ben!! Those guys are busy. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
nothing of value here
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Originally Posted By ERNURSE: I said over a month ago, If not Bakhmut then where. I believe the defenders of Bakhmut will go down in history as those warriors who held the line and gave Ukraine the time to equip themselves with western weapons and troops trained to use them. They have bled the enemy very well and have lost alot themselves. Much as the defenders at Astovol steel plant. Sometimes you just have to hold. There is so much going on that we do not know. All the talk of the spring offensive, kinda like death or the return of Christ...No man knows the hour, and those that say they do are leading you away. I personally believe the "leaked documents" are alot of BS, otherwise our 3 letter agencies would have hung someone out to dry, let alone the true and righteous anger and fury of Ukraine, They would have let the world know who it was. The studies and books that will be written will throw alot of us upside down when really learn the truth. Its amazing watching the world hang on every bit of disinformation. The Ukes have become masters of disinformation and with our help , are shaping the next battlefields. Already so much that we thought of the mighty soviet army has turned out to be crap, I personally hope that there are real War Crime trials and punishments, Orcs who rape, steal, kill and behead people need to pay. View Quote Well said. Armies around the world must be scrambling to analyze and learn from this war! The first world wide Social Media documented war. And Ukraine is doing well with opsec so looking forward to when that can all be revealed in the books. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Seemed like a cool way to make a ships 5"/127mm gun a lot more viable. Those little guided glide shells might not bust a warship, but would work great for disabling blockade running containerships (shot to the bridge?) or disable some of the 'maritime militia' boats China uses. Or just be used as filler to overwhelm enemy air defenses. View Quote Or you can find a way to stick 4 GMLRS-ER in each VLS cell. |
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Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Charles Michel: Europe warming up to Macron’s ‘strategic autonomy’ push away from US European Council president says EU cannot ‘blindly, systematically follow’ Washington. https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-warming-up-to-macrons-strategic-autonomy-push-says-charles-michel/ BRUSSELS — European leaders are becoming increasingly favorable toward French President Emmanuel Macron's push for "strategic autonomy" away from the United States, European Council boss Charles Michel said Tuesday. As controversy swells around Macron's comments that Europe should resist pressure to become "America’s followers," Michel suggested that the French politician’s position was not isolated among EU leaders. While Macron spoke as the French president, his views reflect a growing shift among EU leaders, Michel said. "There has been a leap forward on strategic autonomy compared to several years ago," Michel told French television show La Faute à l'Europe (which has a partnership with POLITICO) in an interview set to air on Wednesday. "On the issue of the relationship with the United States, it's clear that there can be nuances and sensitivities around the table of the European Council. Some European leaders wouldn't say things the same way that Emmanuel Macron did ... I think quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron." Following a trip last week to China with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Macron told POLITICO and French newspaper Les Echos that Europe had to limit its dependency on the United States and avoid getting pulled into "crises that are not ours." "There is indeed a great attachment that remains present — and Emmanuel Macron has said nothing else — for this alliance with the United States. But if this alliance with the United States would suppose that we blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States on all issues, no," Michel said. -->US helping Europe with Ukraine is not likely to be reciprocated by the EU helping the US with Taiwan I'm still 100% on the Fuck Russia, ATACMS for Ukraine lifestyle. But it's important to realize EU fondness of the US due to our support for Ukraine is already waning. Outside of Britain, we really don't have any allies we can count on in Europe. We should be doing more to strengthen the British economically (such as granting them a NAFTA level access to the US market) and Militarily (say getting them discounted munitions and tech.) View Quote I don’t think any of that is new. France has forever skirted sanctions, tried to control EU, and do business with every pariah nation. Those are all words to try to distract from his shameful groveling on knees to China and being humiliated by Xi. France has agreed to become an economic vassal and had to pay homage to its new master. Honestly I could give a rip if France or most of Western Europe was invaded. They have been weak ass allies and always bitching and moaning. Ukraine and Poland should just tell Russia, Listen bub, you are not welcome here, but if you want to grab some Rhineland castles and vineyards and some sweet Riviera beaches then you are welcome to scoot through here most ricky tick. Don’t stop until you see wind turbines! I’m glad UK bailed on the EU and hope it brings them much prosperity and insulation from the EU stupids. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By Saltwater-Hillbilly: Hence Bush II and Trump wanting to make deals with Eastern Europe ("New Europe" in Rumsfeld's words") outside of NATO. France was the first NATO country to establish diplomatic relations with Red China (1964), and the Germans have not been our friends since Helmut Kohl left office not long after the Berlin Wall came down. The entire purpose of expanding the European Community to the European Union in 1994 was to challenge US dominance in the Post-Cold War era. Just as Hungary is looking out for #1, so is Western Europe. France and Germany are looking our for a Europe after Russia has been crippled militarily and economically and is no longer an overwhelming threat to France and Germany. If you don't think the Europeans will undermine US interests for their own benefit, you have not been paying attention to US/European economic and diplomatic history since roughly 1968. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By Saltwater-Hillbilly: Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Charles Michel: Europe warming up to Macron’s ‘strategic autonomy’ push away from US European Council president says EU cannot ‘blindly, systematically follow’ Washington. https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-warming-up-to-macrons-strategic-autonomy-push-says-charles-michel/ BRUSSELS — European leaders are becoming increasingly favorable toward French President Emmanuel Macron's push for "strategic autonomy" away from the United States, European Council boss Charles Michel said Tuesday. As controversy swells around Macron's comments that Europe should resist pressure to become "America’s followers," Michel suggested that the French politician’s position was not isolated among EU leaders. While Macron spoke as the French president, his views reflect a growing shift among EU leaders, Michel said. "There has been a leap forward on strategic autonomy compared to several years ago," Michel told French television show La Faute à l'Europe (which has a partnership with POLITICO) in an interview set to air on Wednesday. "On the issue of the relationship with the United States, it's clear that there can be nuances and sensitivities around the table of the European Council. Some European leaders wouldn't say things the same way that Emmanuel Macron did ... I think quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron." Following a trip last week to China with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Macron told POLITICO and French newspaper Les Echos that Europe had to limit its dependency on the United States and avoid getting pulled into "crises that are not ours." "There is indeed a great attachment that remains present — and Emmanuel Macron has said nothing else — for this alliance with the United States. But if this alliance with the United States would suppose that we blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States on all issues, no," Michel said. -->US helping Europe with Ukraine is not likely to be reciprocated by the EU helping the US with Taiwan I'm still 100% on the Fuck Russia, ATACMS for Ukraine lifestyle. But it's important to realize EU fondness of the US due to our support for Ukraine is already waning. Outside of Britain, we really don't have any allies we can count on in Europe. We should be doing more to strengthen the British economically (such as granting them a NAFTA level access to the US market) and Militarily (say getting them discounted munitions and tech.) Hence Bush II and Trump wanting to make deals with Eastern Europe ("New Europe" in Rumsfeld's words") outside of NATO. France was the first NATO country to establish diplomatic relations with Red China (1964), and the Germans have not been our friends since Helmut Kohl left office not long after the Berlin Wall came down. The entire purpose of expanding the European Community to the European Union in 1994 was to challenge US dominance in the Post-Cold War era. Just as Hungary is looking out for #1, so is Western Europe. France and Germany are looking our for a Europe after Russia has been crippled militarily and economically and is no longer an overwhelming threat to France and Germany. If you don't think the Europeans will undermine US interests for their own benefit, you have not been paying attention to US/European economic and diplomatic history since roughly 1968. Good points. The world needs one simple history lesson and everything else can be worked out. China is asshoe and Russia is barbarian asshoe. Do not feed either. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Delivering freedom around the globe requires an airforce. I imagine B21's flying out of the continental US dropping LRASM's into the South China Sea will be key to the US stopping an invasion of Taiwan, especially if our naval forces and bases in the region get Pearl Harbored by a few hundred ballistic missiles. But for smaller countries trying to defend their borders, I absolutely think HIMARS and other guided missile trucks + SAM systems + drones could replace most of their airforce, and would give a lot more bang for the buck. Romania for example is getting 8X F35s. They probably would be better off with 8x $F35's worth of HIMARS and NASAMS. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Originally Posted By ITCHY-FINGER: Originally Posted By GTLandser: This is what every other commentator I have read/heard has said: for what Ukraine needs most for their upcoming offensive, they can do 95% of what really needs doing without F-16s at all. They have air defenses to keep the worst Russian air attacks away, and GLMRS, Excalibur, and other artillery can reach to the depth necessary to support an offensive just fine, for a fraction of the cost of any aircraft. I still think they should be leaning forward and at least getting the pilots trained, but it will take YEARS before Ukrainian pilots are flying and supporting F16s from home soil. This is coming from ignorance and not trying to be provocative. BUT, since the USA has MUCH more and better GLMRS, MLRS, and every other type of fires, why do we need an Air Force? Is it only for that remaining 5% that the precision fires cannot cover or something else. Or is the Air Force just to cover our immense force projection far from home? Are we rapidly approaching the point where manned aircraft are replaced with drones and super precise missiles? Personally I think Ukraine needs the F16 urgently since Russia is still flying lots of jets. And ATACMs...I guess if they could get only one, probably ATACMs would be the most efficient and cheapest option by far. Delivering freedom around the globe requires an airforce. I imagine B21's flying out of the continental US dropping LRASM's into the South China Sea will be key to the US stopping an invasion of Taiwan, especially if our naval forces and bases in the region get Pearl Harbored by a few hundred ballistic missiles. But for smaller countries trying to defend their borders, I absolutely think HIMARS and other guided missile trucks + SAM systems + drones could replace most of their airforce, and would give a lot more bang for the buck. Romania for example is getting 8X F35s. They probably would be better off with 8x $F35's worth of HIMARS and NASAMS. That seems logical. I would love to see what “equivalent” hit capabilities cost in comparison including maintenance and dedicated logistics. How many launchers and missile and drones to equal an F16? The Ukraine war really shows what happens when you don’t have air dominance whether that is via aircraft or missiles. Slugfest attrition. Damn incredible having a fraction of the Russians in most categories they have done so well. Imagine if they started with thousands of HIMARS and hundreds of ATACMS and tens of NASAMs. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By ITCHY-FINGER: To me it sounds like Belarus is telling Russia..."OK, we went along with your stupid invasion that stirred up the whole world against us and turned Ukraine into a giant hate-filled, raging enemy, all while you got your asses kicked so you better step up when they come HERE looking for payback"...or something more diplomatic... View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By ITCHY-FINGER: Originally Posted By Prime: ETA- I realize now you’re talking domestic Belarus. Article from two days ago in Belarus (BY), which doesn’t seem that remarkable to me as an outsider. Seems like Lukashenko wants it in writing or something. https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/203719/F7EDFF62-DD93-4C9E-8727-E8324F61B8F6-2780461.jpg But then there’s this odd detail- the BY Embassy here in these United States with this.
Almost like they’re haggling for something. It’s like a domestic call where Russia’s like “come back inside, let’s talk about it” and Belarus is in the street finger wagging saying ”oh no, we’ll talk about it NOW”. It’s probably nothing, but what countries say and which embassies they say it from is usually pretty calculated. To me it sounds like Belarus is telling Russia..."OK, we went along with your stupid invasion that stirred up the whole world against us and turned Ukraine into a giant hate-filled, raging enemy, all while you got your asses kicked so you better step up when they come HERE looking for payback"...or something more diplomatic... +1 |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By GTLandser: @Capta Count me as interested in that info as well, please. *As long as there is a valid export license* then this could be a good thing. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By GTLandser: Originally Posted By Capta: TY! Need to round some some M7 Bayonets. Like I said my biggest change would ideally be a Micro RDS. After that I think you could find a lighter rail. The Midwest nightfighter rail is pretty stoutly made and the barrel nut is like 2.5” long. Also pretty affordable compared to some options. I’m not in a position to say that it’s objectively better than a lighter rail for LAM mounting. However even a somewhat heavy rail the rifle is fairly lightweight with a T2. Very nice handing, but somewhat muzzle-heavy. I think irons are the right choice for the situation. The only way I would go no irons is with an ACOG/RDS combo. Had a long phone conversation with the program rep and I will be moving forward. Later tonight or maybe tomorrow I’ll put together a summary and will begin contacting interested persons with all the information for them to decide for themselves. @Capta Count me as interested in that info as well, please. *As long as there is a valid export license* then this could be a good thing. I have a copy of the export license which I will provide along with the comms. |
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New Leaked Documents Show Broad Infighting Among Russian Officials
The additional documents also suggest the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously believed. https://archive.ph/BmFQT The depth of the infighting inside the Russian government appears broader and deeper than previously understood, judging from a newly discovered cache of classified intelligence documents that has been leaked online. The additional documents, which did not surface in a 53-page set that came to wide public attention online last week, paint a picture of the Russian government feuding over the count of the dead and wounded in the Ukraine war, with the domestic intelligence agency accusing the military of obscuring the scale of casualties that Russia has suffered. The new batch, which contains 27 pages, reinforces how deeply American spy agencies have penetrated nearly every aspect of the Russian intelligence apparatus and military command structure. It also shows that the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously understood. In one document, American intelligence officials say that Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., has “accused” the country’s Defense Ministry “of obfuscating Russian casualties in Ukraine.” The finding highlights “the continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command,” they say. F.S.B. officials, the document says, contend that the ministry’s toll did not include the dead and wounded among the Russian National Guard, the Wagner mercenary force or fighters fielded by Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. The sundry fighting forces that the Kremlin has deployed in Ukraine have sometimes acted at cross purposes, further complicating Russia’s military effort. The F.S.B. “calculated the actual number of Russians wounded and killed in action was closer to 110,000,” the document says. The new documents also provide fresh details about a very public dispute in February in which Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the business mogul who runs the Wagner force, accused Russian military officials of withholding urgently needed ammunition from his fighters. Mr. Putin attempted to resolve the dispute personally by calling Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Shoigu into a meeting believed to have taken place on Feb. 22, one document reports. “The meeting almost certainly concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin’s public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu,” the document says, using an alternative transliteration of the minister’s name. One slide that appears to have been produced by the military’s Joint Staff and dated Feb. 23 concludes that Russia has failed to disrupt the massive flow of Western arms and equipment into Ukraine since the start of the war, and asserts that the Kremlin’s battered military will not be able to change that anytime soon. “During the next 6 months, Russia’s economic challenges and degraded conventional capabilities very likely will further impede its efforts, creating a mostly permissive environment for continued lethal aid deliveries,” the document said. |
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Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Why not both? But seriously, we've got 70 Arleigh Burkes (90 planned) with 5" cannons taking up a fair amount of real estate on their decks, and an increasing number of the ships VLS needed to house defensive anti air/ anti missiles rather than offensive weapons. So making the 5" gun an actually useful anti boat / anti ship weapon with 50-100km range and ability to hit moving targets seems quite desirable. https://www.seaforces.org/wpnsys/SURFACE/Mk-45-gun_DAT/Mk-45-gun-027.jpg View Quote Vulcano is what you seek. |
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Originally Posted By Ryan_Ruck: I'm skeptical. There were reports that Russia was supplying Iraq with jammers during OIF and they did nothing but tell our folks where to bomb to kill the jammers. Lots of variables to take into account like are these even the same tech, was the tech updated, JDAM now vs whatever munition used then, etc. but, massive grain of salt here given how lacking Russian wunder-weapons have been to date. U.S. Bombs GPS-Jamming Sites In Iraq, Possibly Sold by Russia Russian GPS Jammers Pose Little Threat In Iraq Also, just a friendly reminder that data in the leaks are probably best regarded as misinformation given the fact st least some data has already been acknowledged as fraudulent, even if the source of the leaks is authentic. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By Ryan_Ruck: Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Russia jamming U.S. smart bombs in Ukraine, leaked docs say A separate technical problem, since fixed, had been causing the munitions to fail. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/12/russia-jamming-u-s-smart-bombs-in-ukraine-leaked-docs-say-00091600 American-made smart bombs are falling victim to Russian electronic jamming in Ukraine, causing them to miss their targets, according to leaked documents and confirmed by a Defense Department official. In some cases, the weapons were also failing to detonate due to a technical issue, which Ukrainian troops have since addressed. The Pentagon in December began sending Kyiv advanced equipment that could convert unguided air-dropped munitions into precision-guided “smart bombs” that can hit Russian targets with a higher degree of accuracy. The guided bombs can be launched by a variety of aircraft such as bombers and fighters, and are called Joint Direct Attack Munitions or JDAMs. The longer-range version being sent to Ukraine is called a JDAM-Extended Range, or JDAM-ER. But the weapons have experienced higher-than-expected dud rates and have missed their targets on the battlefield, according to a leaked slide prepared by the Joint Staff and confirmed by a U.S. official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. In some cases, the bomb fuzes were not arming when they were released, causing the weapon to fail to detonate. The Ukrainian air force put in place a fix to ensure the bombs are arming correctly, according to the slide and the official. A larger problem is that Russia is using GPS jamming to interfere with the weapons’ targeting process, according to the slide and a separate person familiar with the issue who’s not in the U.S. government. American officials believe Russian jamming is causing the JDAMs, and at times other American weapons such as guided rockets, to miss their mark. “I do think there may be concern that the Russians may be jamming the signal used to direct the JDAMs, which would answer why these munitions are not performing in the manner expected and how they perform in other war zones,” said Mick Mulroy a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer. I'm skeptical. There were reports that Russia was supplying Iraq with jammers during OIF and they did nothing but tell our folks where to bomb to kill the jammers. Lots of variables to take into account like are these even the same tech, was the tech updated, JDAM now vs whatever munition used then, etc. but, massive grain of salt here given how lacking Russian wunder-weapons have been to date. U.S. Bombs GPS-Jamming Sites In Iraq, Possibly Sold by Russia Russian GPS Jammers Pose Little Threat In Iraq Also, just a friendly reminder that data in the leaks are probably best regarded as misinformation given the fact st least some data has already been acknowledged as fraudulent, even if the source of the leaks is authentic. Russian EW warfare has made leaps and bounds since the Iraq war. That is one area they have spent a ton of money on. they are pretty good at EW |
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Only God will judge me.
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Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: New Leaked Documents Show Broad Infighting Among Russian Officials The additional documents also suggest the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously believed. https://archive.ph/BmFQT The depth of the infighting inside the Russian government appears broader and deeper than previously understood, judging from a newly discovered cache of classified intelligence documents that has been leaked online. The additional documents, which did not surface in a 53-page set that came to wide public attention online last week, paint a picture of the Russian government feuding over the count of the dead and wounded in the Ukraine war, with the domestic intelligence agency accusing the military of obscuring the scale of casualties that Russia has suffered. The new batch, which contains 27 pages, reinforces how deeply American spy agencies have penetrated nearly every aspect of the Russian intelligence apparatus and military command structure. It also shows that the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously understood. In one document, American intelligence officials say that Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., has “accused” the country’s Defense Ministry “of obfuscating Russian casualties in Ukraine.” The finding highlights “the continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command,” they say. F.S.B. officials, the document says, contend that the ministry’s toll did not include the dead and wounded among the Russian National Guard, the Wagner mercenary force or fighters fielded by Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. The sundry fighting forces that the Kremlin has deployed in Ukraine have sometimes acted at cross purposes, further complicating Russia’s military effort. The F.S.B. “calculated the actual number of Russians wounded and killed in action was closer to 110,000,” the document says. The new documents also provide fresh details about a very public dispute in February in which Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the business mogul who runs the Wagner force, accused Russian military officials of withholding urgently needed ammunition from his fighters. Mr. Putin attempted to resolve the dispute personally by calling Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Shoigu into a meeting believed to have taken place on Feb. 22, one document reports. “The meeting almost certainly concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin’s public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu,” the document says, using an alternative transliteration of the minister’s name. One slide that appears to have been produced by the military’s Joint Staff and dated Feb. 23 concludes that Russia has failed to disrupt the massive flow of Western arms and equipment into Ukraine since the start of the war, and asserts that the Kremlin’s battered military will not be able to change that anytime soon. “During the next 6 months, Russia’s economic challenges and degraded conventional capabilities very likely will further impede its efforts, creating a mostly permissive environment for continued lethal aid deliveries,” the document said. View Quote FFS!! they need to stop these fucking leaks... |
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Only God will judge me.
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Originally Posted By AROKIE: FFS!! they need to stop these fucking leaks... View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By AROKIE: Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: New Leaked Documents Show Broad Infighting Among Russian Officials The additional documents also suggest the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously believed. https://archive.ph/BmFQT The depth of the infighting inside the Russian government appears broader and deeper than previously understood, judging from a newly discovered cache of classified intelligence documents that has been leaked online. The additional documents, which did not surface in a 53-page set that came to wide public attention online last week, paint a picture of the Russian government feuding over the count of the dead and wounded in the Ukraine war, with the domestic intelligence agency accusing the military of obscuring the scale of casualties that Russia has suffered. The new batch, which contains 27 pages, reinforces how deeply American spy agencies have penetrated nearly every aspect of the Russian intelligence apparatus and military command structure. It also shows that the breach of American intelligence agencies could contain far more material than previously understood. In one document, American intelligence officials say that Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., has “accused” the country’s Defense Ministry “of obfuscating Russian casualties in Ukraine.” The finding highlights “the continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command,” they say. F.S.B. officials, the document says, contend that the ministry’s toll did not include the dead and wounded among the Russian National Guard, the Wagner mercenary force or fighters fielded by Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. The sundry fighting forces that the Kremlin has deployed in Ukraine have sometimes acted at cross purposes, further complicating Russia’s military effort. The F.S.B. “calculated the actual number of Russians wounded and killed in action was closer to 110,000,” the document says. The new documents also provide fresh details about a very public dispute in February in which Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the business mogul who runs the Wagner force, accused Russian military officials of withholding urgently needed ammunition from his fighters. Mr. Putin attempted to resolve the dispute personally by calling Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Shoigu into a meeting believed to have taken place on Feb. 22, one document reports. “The meeting almost certainly concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin’s public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu,” the document says, using an alternative transliteration of the minister’s name. One slide that appears to have been produced by the military’s Joint Staff and dated Feb. 23 concludes that Russia has failed to disrupt the massive flow of Western arms and equipment into Ukraine since the start of the war, and asserts that the Kremlin’s battered military will not be able to change that anytime soon. “During the next 6 months, Russia’s economic challenges and degraded conventional capabilities very likely will further impede its efforts, creating a mostly permissive environment for continued lethal aid deliveries,” the document said. FFS!! they need to stop these fucking leaks... It was just announced Gen Mark “Loose Lips” Milley is retiring this year. Coincidence? At 65 for a political animal that loves the limelight? Hmmm |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Blyat
Let's go Brandon President of the Volodymyr Zelenskyy fan club |
https://wapo.st/3UvaNTQ
Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT Click To View Spoiler (Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; iStock) The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people. 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 he spent 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 government computer 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. Story continues below advertisement 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 watched movies 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. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see. There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. “If you could think it, it was in those documents.” In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves, an astonishing cache of secrets that has been steadily spilling into public view over the past week, disrupting U.S. foreign policy and aggravating America’s allies. This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video. He asked that his voice not be obscured. What to know about the Discord leaks His account was corroborated by a second member who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. Both members said they know OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks. The investigation is in its early stages, and the Pentagon has set up its own internal review led by a senior official. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement. Discord said in a statement that it is cooperating with law enforcement and has declined to comment further. The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said. Story continues below advertisement In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target. The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure. “I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts. “It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.” A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the contents of the files. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The member met OG about four years ago, on a different server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streams videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. He said a group of avid members found the server too crowded and wanted a quieter place to talk about video game tactics, so they broke off into their own, small group. More like-minded Oxide fans joined the private Discord server, which came to be named “Thug Shaker Central,” and whose membership OG would effectively control as the administrator. “We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.” OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry. Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear. “He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.” That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it. Story continues below advertisement OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year. Posting pictures to the server took less time. But it also exposed OG to greater risk. In the background of some images, they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel — the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators. The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.” In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours. Inside the Discord server, he was the ultimate arbiter of secrecy, and he allowed his companions to read truths that “normal citizens” could not. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the online community. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search. OG’s documents look to have been printed on ordinary paper and were creased after having been folded in four. Sometimes, the photographs OG took of the documents appeared to have been taken over a bed. Items such as Gorilla Glue, a scope manual and nail clippers appeared in the margins. Other previously unreported images reviewed by The Post showed printed documents lying on top of a glowing red keyboard. The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine. At least one of the documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles. The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict. But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption. OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor. It was not “a fascist recruiting server,” he told The Post. Story continues below advertisement One thing the members were not supposed to do was talk about the secrets OG had shared with them, including the classified documents. “Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn’t be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens — including from Russia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared. The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. It’s not clear whether any of those efforts have been successful. But if foreign operatives finagled an invitation to OG’s server, they would have been free to view the documents and make copies of them, as some members did. The server sprouts a leak All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command. On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao. Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side. The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member said. “He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands.” Story continues below advertisement For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists. Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.” In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared. When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.” In hours of interviews, he continued to express admiration and loyalty to a man who may have endangered his young followers by allowing them to see and possess classified information, exposing them to potential federal crimes. “I figured he would not be putting us in any sort of harm’s way,” the member said. The exposure of the documents has severed friendships and cut him off from the man who buoyed his confidence and made him feel safe. The member said that the stress of the loss, coupled with the enormity of the leaks, has left him worried and sleepless. Now he says he believes that the world should see the secrets OG passed along to a tiny group. He argued that the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies spend their tax dollars, and was particularly outraged that the documents show U.S. surveillance of foreign allies. But what the young man regarded as a revelation will come as no surprise to the countries whose officials the U.S. has been monitoring for decades. While rarely discussed, and embarrassing for Washington when exposed, it’s widely understood that the U.S. intelligence community monitors many friendly governments, just as foreign allies try to do the same. Story continues below advertisement Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne. The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows. The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community. “Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.” He insisted said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.” To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.” |
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More info that is worth considering: https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/track-two-of-eu-ammunition-plan-stalls-over-legal-definitions/ |
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Originally Posted By HIPPO: https://wapo.st/3UvaNTQ Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT Click To View Spoiler (Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; iStock) The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people. 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 he spent 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 government computer 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. Story continues below advertisement 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 watched movies 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. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see. There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. “If you could think it, it was in those documents.” In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves, an astonishing cache of secrets that has been steadily spilling into public view over the past week, disrupting U.S. foreign policy and aggravating America’s allies. This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video. He asked that his voice not be obscured. What to know about the Discord leaks His account was corroborated by a second member who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. Both members said they know OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks. The investigation is in its early stages, and the Pentagon has set up its own internal review led by a senior official. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement. Discord said in a statement that it is cooperating with law enforcement and has declined to comment further. The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said. Story continues below advertisement In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target. The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure. “I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts. “It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.” A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the contents of the files. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The member met OG about four years ago, on a different server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streams videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. He said a group of avid members found the server too crowded and wanted a quieter place to talk about video game tactics, so they broke off into their own, small group. More like-minded Oxide fans joined the private Discord server, which came to be named “Thug Shaker Central,” and whose membership OG would effectively control as the administrator. “We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.” OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry. Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear. “He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.” That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it. Story continues below advertisement OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year. Posting pictures to the server took less time. But it also exposed OG to greater risk. In the background of some images, they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel — the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators. The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.” In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours. Inside the Discord server, he was the ultimate arbiter of secrecy, and he allowed his companions to read truths that “normal citizens” could not. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the online community. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search. OG’s documents look to have been printed on ordinary paper and were creased after having been folded in four. Sometimes, the photographs OG took of the documents appeared to have been taken over a bed. Items such as Gorilla Glue, a scope manual and nail clippers appeared in the margins. Other previously unreported images reviewed by The Post showed printed documents lying on top of a glowing red keyboard. The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine. At least one of the documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles. The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict. But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption. OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor. It was not “a fascist recruiting server,” he told The Post. Story continues below advertisement One thing the members were not supposed to do was talk about the secrets OG had shared with them, including the classified documents. “Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn’t be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens — including from Russia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared. The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. It’s not clear whether any of those efforts have been successful. But if foreign operatives finagled an invitation to OG’s server, they would have been free to view the documents and make copies of them, as some members did. The server sprouts a leak All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command. On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao. Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side. The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member said. “He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands.” Story continues below advertisement For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists. Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.” In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared. When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.” In hours of interviews, he continued to express admiration and loyalty to a man who may have endangered his young followers by allowing them to see and possess classified information, exposing them to potential federal crimes. “I figured he would not be putting us in any sort of harm’s way,” the member said. The exposure of the documents has severed friendships and cut him off from the man who buoyed his confidence and made him feel safe. The member said that the stress of the loss, coupled with the enormity of the leaks, has left him worried and sleepless. Now he says he believes that the world should see the secrets OG passed along to a tiny group. He argued that the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies spend their tax dollars, and was particularly outraged that the documents show U.S. surveillance of foreign allies. But what the young man regarded as a revelation will come as no surprise to the countries whose officials the U.S. has been monitoring for decades. While rarely discussed, and embarrassing for Washington when exposed, it’s widely understood that the U.S. intelligence community monitors many friendly governments, just as foreign allies try to do the same. Story continues below advertisement Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne. The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows. The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community. “Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.” He insisted said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.” To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.” View Quote Wow. The stupid of that OG guy is mind boggling. He even knew half the discord “family” were foreigners including Russia. Sounds like with all the postings and interactions the feds will nail him soon. Apparently no earth shattering info bits but the gross abuse of access is inexcusable. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
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Originally Posted By HIPPO: https://wapo.st/3UvaNTQ Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT Click To View Spoiler (Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; iStock) The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people. 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 he spent 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 government computer 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. Story continues below advertisement 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 watched movies 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. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see. There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. “If you could think it, it was in those documents.” In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves, an astonishing cache of secrets that has been steadily spilling into public view over the past week, disrupting U.S. foreign policy and aggravating America’s allies. This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video. He asked that his voice not be obscured. What to know about the Discord leaks His account was corroborated by a second member who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. Both members said they know OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks. The investigation is in its early stages, and the Pentagon has set up its own internal review led by a senior official. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement. Discord said in a statement that it is cooperating with law enforcement and has declined to comment further. The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said. Story continues below advertisement In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target. The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure. “I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts. “It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.” A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the contents of the files. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The member met OG about four years ago, on a different server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streams videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. He said a group of avid members found the server too crowded and wanted a quieter place to talk about video game tactics, so they broke off into their own, small group. More like-minded Oxide fans joined the private Discord server, which came to be named “Thug Shaker Central,” and whose membership OG would effectively control as the administrator. “We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.” OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry. Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear. “He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.” That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it. Story continues below advertisement OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year. Posting pictures to the server took less time. But it also exposed OG to greater risk. In the background of some images, they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel — the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators. The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.” In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours. Inside the Discord server, he was the ultimate arbiter of secrecy, and he allowed his companions to read truths that “normal citizens” could not. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the online community. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search. OG’s documents look to have been printed on ordinary paper and were creased after having been folded in four. Sometimes, the photographs OG took of the documents appeared to have been taken over a bed. Items such as Gorilla Glue, a scope manual and nail clippers appeared in the margins. Other previously unreported images reviewed by The Post showed printed documents lying on top of a glowing red keyboard. The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine. At least one of the documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles. The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict. But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption. OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor. It was not “a fascist recruiting server,” he told The Post. Story continues below advertisement One thing the members were not supposed to do was talk about the secrets OG had shared with them, including the classified documents. “Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn’t be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens — including from Russia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared. The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. It’s not clear whether any of those efforts have been successful. But if foreign operatives finagled an invitation to OG’s server, they would have been free to view the documents and make copies of them, as some members did. The server sprouts a leak All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command. On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao. Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side. The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member said. “He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands.” Story continues below advertisement For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists. Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.” In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared. When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.” In hours of interviews, he continued to express admiration and loyalty to a man who may have endangered his young followers by allowing them to see and possess classified information, exposing them to potential federal crimes. “I figured he would not be putting us in any sort of harm’s way,” the member said. The exposure of the documents has severed friendships and cut him off from the man who buoyed his confidence and made him feel safe. The member said that the stress of the loss, coupled with the enormity of the leaks, has left him worried and sleepless. Now he says he believes that the world should see the secrets OG passed along to a tiny group. He argued that the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies spend their tax dollars, and was particularly outraged that the documents show U.S. surveillance of foreign allies. But what the young man regarded as a revelation will come as no surprise to the countries whose officials the U.S. has been monitoring for decades. While rarely discussed, and embarrassing for Washington when exposed, it’s widely understood that the U.S. intelligence community monitors many friendly governments, just as foreign allies try to do the same. Story continues below advertisement Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne. The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows. The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community. “Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.” He insisted said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.” To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.” View Quote Fuck me...so some dumb fucking incel dumped all this shit online to impress some gamer boys.. little dis he know he could be changing history due to his antics. |
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Only God will judge me.
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Originally Posted By HIPPO:
More info that is worth considering: https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/track-two-of-eu-ammunition-plan-stalls-over-legal-definitions/ View Quote Macron sure is doing a huge 180 lately. China must pay pretty damn good. Guess Biden isn't rhe only one in on the China grift |
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Only God will judge me.
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Originally Posted By Schmigs: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ftk5nC_XoAAoelP?format=png&name=medium View Quote It's been a looooong time since zero tanks have been deleted from the battlefield. If ever |
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Only God will judge me.
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Originally Posted By AROKIE: Fuck me...so some dumb fucking incel dumped all this shit online to impress some gamer boys.. little dis he know he could be changing history due to his antics. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By AROKIE: Originally Posted By HIPPO: https://wapo.st/3UvaNTQ Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT Click To View Spoiler (Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; iStock) The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people. 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 he spent 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 government computer 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. Story continues below advertisement 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 watched movies 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. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see. There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. “If you could think it, it was in those documents.” In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves, an astonishing cache of secrets that has been steadily spilling into public view over the past week, disrupting U.S. foreign policy and aggravating America’s allies. This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video. He asked that his voice not be obscured. What to know about the Discord leaks His account was corroborated by a second member who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. Both members said they know OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks. The investigation is in its early stages, and the Pentagon has set up its own internal review led by a senior official. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement. Discord said in a statement that it is cooperating with law enforcement and has declined to comment further. The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said. Story continues below advertisement In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target. The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure. “I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts. “It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.” A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the contents of the files. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The member met OG about four years ago, on a different server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streams videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. He said a group of avid members found the server too crowded and wanted a quieter place to talk about video game tactics, so they broke off into their own, small group. More like-minded Oxide fans joined the private Discord server, which came to be named “Thug Shaker Central,” and whose membership OG would effectively control as the administrator. “We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.” OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry. Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear. “He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.” That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it. Story continues below advertisement OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year. Posting pictures to the server took less time. But it also exposed OG to greater risk. In the background of some images, they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel — the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators. The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.” In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours. Inside the Discord server, he was the ultimate arbiter of secrecy, and he allowed his companions to read truths that “normal citizens” could not. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the online community. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search. OG’s documents look to have been printed on ordinary paper and were creased after having been folded in four. Sometimes, the photographs OG took of the documents appeared to have been taken over a bed. Items such as Gorilla Glue, a scope manual and nail clippers appeared in the margins. Other previously unreported images reviewed by The Post showed printed documents lying on top of a glowing red keyboard. The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine. At least one of the documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles. The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict. But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption. OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor. It was not “a fascist recruiting server,” he told The Post. Story continues below advertisement One thing the members were not supposed to do was talk about the secrets OG had shared with them, including the classified documents. “Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn’t be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens — including from Russia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared. The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. It’s not clear whether any of those efforts have been successful. But if foreign operatives finagled an invitation to OG’s server, they would have been free to view the documents and make copies of them, as some members did. The server sprouts a leak All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command. On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao. Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side. The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member said. “He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands.” Story continues below advertisement For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists. Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.” In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared. When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.” In hours of interviews, he continued to express admiration and loyalty to a man who may have endangered his young followers by allowing them to see and possess classified information, exposing them to potential federal crimes. “I figured he would not be putting us in any sort of harm’s way,” the member said. The exposure of the documents has severed friendships and cut him off from the man who buoyed his confidence and made him feel safe. The member said that the stress of the loss, coupled with the enormity of the leaks, has left him worried and sleepless. Now he says he believes that the world should see the secrets OG passed along to a tiny group. He argued that the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies spend their tax dollars, and was particularly outraged that the documents show U.S. surveillance of foreign allies. But what the young man regarded as a revelation will come as no surprise to the countries whose officials the U.S. has been monitoring for decades. While rarely discussed, and embarrassing for Washington when exposed, it’s widely understood that the U.S. intelligence community monitors many friendly governments, just as foreign allies try to do the same. Story continues below advertisement Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne. The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows. The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community. “Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.” He insisted said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.” To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.” Fuck me...so some dumb fucking incel dumped all this shit online to impress some gamer boys.. little dis he know he could be changing history due to his antics. Dumping text copies and then actual pics of documents by the hundreds over several months. Amazingly dumb. Not just a one time leak but MONTHS OF DAILY LEAKS. To members known to be foreigners. |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By HIPPO:
View Quote Send it to me for…ugh..evaluation. |
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Blyat
Let's go Brandon President of the Volodymyr Zelenskyy fan club |
The OG leaker says he works at a military base. Fort Meade, home of the NSA, is a military base. The guy seems to have some broad access since the leaks have reference to Five Eyes and DOD documents. Another Snowden type idealist maybe. It doesn't appear he was trying to make money on this but wanted to impress his fellow gamer geeks.
Whoever he is, they need to nail his ass. |
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Originally Posted By AROKIE: Russian EW warfare has made leaps and bounds since the Iraq war. That is one area they have spent a ton of money on. they are pretty good at EW View Quote The Ukrainians are flying comercial drones right over Russian EW stations but they are capable to jam JDAMs? Interesting,... |
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„From a place you will not see, comes a sound you will not hear.“
Thanks for the membership @ toaster |
„From a place you will not see, comes a sound you will not hear.“
Thanks for the membership @ toaster |
Perhaps it's on the way to Fort Benning Armor School.
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Originally Posted By 4xGM300m: More pictures: https://i.imgur.com/XZnKvzK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/frwzA62.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4pcdN9Z.jpg https://i.imgur.com/v8Dgwro.jpg T-90A at a truck stop in Louisiana. April 2023 View Quote Hopefully we get more complete examples to form an Aggressor force |
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Originally Posted By 4xGM300m: More pictures: https://i.imgur.com/XZnKvzK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/frwzA62.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4pcdN9Z.jpg https://i.imgur.com/v8Dgwro.jpg T-90A at a truck stop in Louisiana. April 2023 View Quote Small world! I know those marks. That's the Mechanized unit that fixed our van. |
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Originally Posted By HIPPO: https://wapo.st/3UvaNTQ Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT Click To View Spoiler (Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; iStock) The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people. 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 he spent 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 government computer 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. Story continues below advertisement 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 watched movies 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. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see. There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. “If you could think it, it was in those documents.” In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves, an astonishing cache of secrets that has been steadily spilling into public view over the past week, disrupting U.S. foreign policy and aggravating America’s allies. This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video. He asked that his voice not be obscured. What to know about the Discord leaks His account was corroborated by a second member who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. Both members said they know OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks. The investigation is in its early stages, and the Pentagon has set up its own internal review led by a senior official. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement. Discord said in a statement that it is cooperating with law enforcement and has declined to comment further. The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said. Story continues below advertisement In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target. The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure. “I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts. “It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.” A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the contents of the files. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The member met OG about four years ago, on a different server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streams videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. He said a group of avid members found the server too crowded and wanted a quieter place to talk about video game tactics, so they broke off into their own, small group. More like-minded Oxide fans joined the private Discord server, which came to be named “Thug Shaker Central,” and whose membership OG would effectively control as the administrator. “We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.” OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry. Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear. “He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.” That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it. Story continues below advertisement OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year. Posting pictures to the server took less time. But it also exposed OG to greater risk. In the background of some images, they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel — the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators. The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.” In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours. Inside the Discord server, he was the ultimate arbiter of secrecy, and he allowed his companions to read truths that “normal citizens” could not. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the online community. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search. OG’s documents look to have been printed on ordinary paper and were creased after having been folded in four. Sometimes, the photographs OG took of the documents appeared to have been taken over a bed. Items such as Gorilla Glue, a scope manual and nail clippers appeared in the margins. Other previously unreported images reviewed by The Post showed printed documents lying on top of a glowing red keyboard. The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine. At least one of the documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles. The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict. But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption. OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor. It was not “a fascist recruiting server,” he told The Post. Story continues below advertisement One thing the members were not supposed to do was talk about the secrets OG had shared with them, including the classified documents. “Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn’t be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens — including from Russia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared. The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. It’s not clear whether any of those efforts have been successful. But if foreign operatives finagled an invitation to OG’s server, they would have been free to view the documents and make copies of them, as some members did. The server sprouts a leak All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command. On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao. Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side. The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member said. “He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands.” Story continues below advertisement For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists. Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.” In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared. When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.” In hours of interviews, he continued to express admiration and loyalty to a man who may have endangered his young followers by allowing them to see and possess classified information, exposing them to potential federal crimes. “I figured he would not be putting us in any sort of harm’s way,” the member said. The exposure of the documents has severed friendships and cut him off from the man who buoyed his confidence and made him feel safe. The member said that the stress of the loss, coupled with the enormity of the leaks, has left him worried and sleepless. Now he says he believes that the world should see the secrets OG passed along to a tiny group. He argued that the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies spend their tax dollars, and was particularly outraged that the documents show U.S. surveillance of foreign allies. But what the young man regarded as a revelation will come as no surprise to the countries whose officials the U.S. has been monitoring for decades. While rarely discussed, and embarrassing for Washington when exposed, it’s widely understood that the U.S. intelligence community monitors many friendly governments, just as foreign allies try to do the same. Story continues below advertisement Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne. The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows. The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community. “Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.” He insisted said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.” To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.” View Quote Wow. Great read and very believable. At least he impressed some kids on the internet. |
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“If by chance you were to ask me which ornaments I would desire above all others in my house, I would reply, without much pause for reflection, arms and books.”
Baldassare Castiglione |
Originally Posted By Saltwater-Hillbilly: Isolationism is something we have tried as a nation, and failed miserably at, throughout our history. "Isolationism" and "Not going off half-cocked everywhere as some kind of self-appointed World Police" are two different things. Ukraine, though our policy is far from perfect, is probably one of the best applications of American military/diplomatic/economic power in the last 20 years. View Quote ^^This^^ I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but the US has so many "interests" that it can't please everyone. No wonder why most of our policies look "half-assed". Regarding Ukraine and the US policy, sure looks like a half-blind, non-binary squirrel is finding an acorn. I can only hope this aligning of the stars happens more often. |
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Blyat
Let's go Brandon President of the Volodymyr Zelenskyy fan club |
Originally Posted By AROKIE: Russian EW warfare has made leaps and bounds since the Iraq war. That is one area they have spent a ton of money on. they are pretty good at EW View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By AROKIE: Originally Posted By Ryan_Ruck: Originally Posted By spydercomonkey: Russia jamming U.S. smart bombs in Ukraine, leaked docs say A separate technical problem, since fixed, had been causing the munitions to fail. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/12/russia-jamming-u-s-smart-bombs-in-ukraine-leaked-docs-say-00091600 American-made smart bombs are falling victim to Russian electronic jamming in Ukraine, causing them to miss their targets, according to leaked documents and confirmed by a Defense Department official. In some cases, the weapons were also failing to detonate due to a technical issue, which Ukrainian troops have since addressed. The Pentagon in December began sending Kyiv advanced equipment that could convert unguided air-dropped munitions into precision-guided “smart bombs” that can hit Russian targets with a higher degree of accuracy. The guided bombs can be launched by a variety of aircraft such as bombers and fighters, and are called Joint Direct Attack Munitions or JDAMs. The longer-range version being sent to Ukraine is called a JDAM-Extended Range, or JDAM-ER. But the weapons have experienced higher-than-expected dud rates and have missed their targets on the battlefield, according to a leaked slide prepared by the Joint Staff and confirmed by a U.S. official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. In some cases, the bomb fuzes were not arming when they were released, causing the weapon to fail to detonate. The Ukrainian air force put in place a fix to ensure the bombs are arming correctly, according to the slide and the official. A larger problem is that Russia is using GPS jamming to interfere with the weapons’ targeting process, according to the slide and a separate person familiar with the issue who’s not in the U.S. government. American officials believe Russian jamming is causing the JDAMs, and at times other American weapons such as guided rockets, to miss their mark. “I do think there may be concern that the Russians may be jamming the signal used to direct the JDAMs, which would answer why these munitions are not performing in the manner expected and how they perform in other war zones,” said Mick Mulroy a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer. I'm skeptical. There were reports that Russia was supplying Iraq with jammers during OIF and they did nothing but tell our folks where to bomb to kill the jammers. Lots of variables to take into account like are these even the same tech, was the tech updated, JDAM now vs whatever munition used then, etc. but, massive grain of salt here given how lacking Russian wunder-weapons have been to date. U.S. Bombs GPS-Jamming Sites In Iraq, Possibly Sold by Russia Russian GPS Jammers Pose Little Threat In Iraq Also, just a friendly reminder that data in the leaks are probably best regarded as misinformation given the fact st least some data has already been acknowledged as fraudulent, even if the source of the leaks is authentic. Russian EW warfare has made leaps and bounds since the Iraq war. That is one area they have spent a ton of money on. they are pretty good at EW From the I believe RUSI analysis of the initial invasion, Russian EW was almost too good: it was jamming the invasion forces comms as well. Here's an article on that: https://archive.ph/YzbWg In the first days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Russian jamming disrupted Ukraine's air-defense radars and communications links. The problem for Russian forces is that their electronic warfare also jammed their own communications. This "electronic fratricide" became so acute that Russian troops had to stop disrupting Ukrainian communications, according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. |
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Originally Posted By ILfreedom: If I'm Putin right now I'd be having severe doubts if my generals told me they can handle a Ukrainian offensive. His best bet is to abandon this war, declare victory, and move on. View Quote Maybe Russians are gullible enough. Claim victory. Liberation complete. Then in a month or two, when Ukraine attacks, they are the aggressor. But then, how do you tell your people that your 2nd strongest army in the world just got smacked in the face and couldn't counterpunch? |
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Originally Posted By Prime: Wow. Great read and very believable. At least he impressed some kids on the internet. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By Prime: Originally Posted By HIPPO: https://wapo.st/3UvaNTQ Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post April 12, 2023 at 9:36 p.m. EDT Click To View Spoiler (Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; iStock) The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic. United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people. 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 he spent 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 government computer 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. Story continues below advertisement 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 watched movies 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. “He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were posted shares information on the man behind the leak, who some call “OG.” (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see. There were top-secret reports about the whereabouts and movements of high-ranking political leaders and tactical updates on military forces, the member said. Geopolitical analysis. Insights into foreign governments’ efforts to interfere with elections. “If you could think it, it was in those documents.” In those initial posts, OG had given his fellow members a small sip of the torrent of secrets that was to come. When rendering hundreds of classified files by hand proved too tiresome, he began posting hundreds of photos of documents themselves, an astonishing cache of secrets that has been steadily spilling into public view over the past week, disrupting U.S. foreign policy and aggravating America’s allies. This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video. He asked that his voice not be obscured. What to know about the Discord leaks His account was corroborated by a second member who read many of the same classified documents shared by OG, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. Both members said they know OG’s real name as well as the state where he lives and works but declined to share that information while the FBI is hunting for the source of the leaks. The investigation is in its early stages, and the Pentagon has set up its own internal review led by a senior official. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our Allies and partners,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement. Discord said in a statement that it is cooperating with law enforcement and has declined to comment further. The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said. Story continues below advertisement In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target. The member seemed drawn to OG’s bravado and his skill with weapons. He felt a certain kinship with a man he described as “like an uncle” and, on another occasion, as a father figure. “I was one of the very few people in the server that was able to understand that these [documents] were legitimate,” the member said, setting himself apart from the others who mostly ignored OG’s posts. “It felt like I was on top of Mount Everest,” he said. “I felt like I was above everyone else to some degree and that … I knew stuff that they didn’t.” A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the contents of the files. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The member met OG about four years ago, on a different server for fans of Oxide, a popular YouTuber who streams videos about guns, body armor and military hardware. He said a group of avid members found the server too crowded and wanted a quieter place to talk about video game tactics, so they broke off into their own, small group. More like-minded Oxide fans joined the private Discord server, which came to be named “Thug Shaker Central,” and whose membership OG would effectively control as the administrator. “We all grew very close to each other, like a tightknit family,” the member said. “We depended on each other.” He said that other members, and OG especially, counseled him during bouts of depression and helped to steady him emotionally. “There was no lack of love for each other.” OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry. Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear. “He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.” That’s when OG changed tactics. Rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard, he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server. These were more vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings. Some featured detailed charts of battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States. Another featured photographs of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country in February, snapped from eye-level, probably by a U-2 spy plane, along with a diagram of the balloon and the surveillance technology attached to it. Story continues below advertisement OG shared several documents a week, beginning late last year. Posting pictures to the server took less time. But it also exposed OG to greater risk. In the background of some images, they could see items and furniture that they recognized from the room where OG spoke to them via video on the Discord channel — the kind of clues that could prove useful for federal investigators. The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.” In a sense, OG had created a virtual mirror image of the secretive facility where he spent his working hours. Inside the Discord server, he was the ultimate arbiter of secrecy, and he allowed his companions to read truths that “normal citizens” could not. A member of the Discord group where classified intelligence documents were leaked describes the online community. (Video: Whitney Shefte, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post) The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search. OG’s documents look to have been printed on ordinary paper and were creased after having been folded in four. Sometimes, the photographs OG took of the documents appeared to have been taken over a bed. Items such as Gorilla Glue, a scope manual and nail clippers appeared in the margins. Other previously unreported images reviewed by The Post showed printed documents lying on top of a glowing red keyboard. The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine. At least one of the documents appeared to have been printed from Intellipedia, a data-sharing system that intelligence agencies use to collaborate and post reports and articles. The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict. But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption. OG’s group itself had a dark side. The Discord server’s eventual name, Thug Shaker Central, was a racist allusion, and signaled to members that they were free to hurl epithets and crude jokes. The young member expressed some regret for their behavior but seemed to shrug off the offensive remarks as a clumsy attempt at humor. It was not “a fascist recruiting server,” he told The Post. Story continues below advertisement One thing the members were not supposed to do was talk about the secrets OG had shared with them, including the classified documents. “Most people in the server were smart enough as to kind of realize that … they shouldn’t be posted anywhere else,” the member said. And yet, the group contained foreign citizens — including from Russia and Ukraine, the members said — a defiance of the NOFORN warning printed across the top of so many documents OG shared. The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland. For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. It’s not clear whether any of those efforts have been successful. But if foreign operatives finagled an invitation to OG’s server, they would have been free to view the documents and make copies of them, as some members did. The server sprouts a leak All winter, OG uploaded documents to the server. No one talked about sharing them elsewhere. Then, unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, another teenage user from the Thug Shaker Central server began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence could see into Russia’s military command. On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao. Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month. Meanwhile, OG stopped sharing images in the middle of March. On April 5, classified documents assessing the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian Telegram channels and the message board platform 4chan, and began migrating to Twitter. One image, showing a March 1 Ukraine status update, had been crudely doctored to inflate the number of Ukrainian casualties and downplay those on the Russian side. The next day, shortly before the New York Times first reported on the leak, OG came into the server “frantic, which is unusual for him,” the member said. “He said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. … But now it’s in God’s hands.” Story continues below advertisement For all OG’s disdain for the federal government, the member said there was no indication that he was acting in what he thought was the public interest by exposing official secrets. The classified documents were intended only to benefit his online family, the member said. “I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest,” he said, resisting comparisons to Edward Snowden, who shared classified documents about government surveillance with journalists. Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks. After shuttering the Thug Shaker Central server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family. He “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” the member said. “He’s fully aware of what’s happening and what the consequences may be. He’s just not sure on how to go about solving this situation. … He seems pretty distraught about it.” In his final message to his companions, OG admonished them to “keep low and delete any information that could possibly relate to him,” the member said. That included any copies of the classified documents OG had shared. When it dawned on them that OG was in grave peril and intended to disappear, the members of Thug Shaker Central “full-on sobbed and cried,” the young member said. “It is like losing a family member.” In hours of interviews, he continued to express admiration and loyalty to a man who may have endangered his young followers by allowing them to see and possess classified information, exposing them to potential federal crimes. “I figured he would not be putting us in any sort of harm’s way,” the member said. The exposure of the documents has severed friendships and cut him off from the man who buoyed his confidence and made him feel safe. The member said that the stress of the loss, coupled with the enormity of the leaks, has left him worried and sleepless. Now he says he believes that the world should see the secrets OG passed along to a tiny group. He argued that the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies spend their tax dollars, and was particularly outraged that the documents show U.S. surveillance of foreign allies. But what the young man regarded as a revelation will come as no surprise to the countries whose officials the U.S. has been monitoring for decades. While rarely discussed, and embarrassing for Washington when exposed, it’s widely understood that the U.S. intelligence community monitors many friendly governments, just as foreign allies try to do the same. Story continues below advertisement Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared, according to U.S. officials and experts who have seen the documents reported in the media. Despite what his young followers thought, OG would have had no special knowledge compared with his peers. He possessed no special power to predict events. Rather, he appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne. The member said he’s confident the authorities will find OG. But when they do, he won’t be charged. Instead, he believes, OG will be imprisoned without due process at Guantánamo Bay or disappeared to a “black site,” if he’s not “assassinated” for what he knows. The member, as well as the OG follower who corroborated his account, found no fault in their leader’s actions and instead said they blame the teen who posted the documents on the wow_mao server for wrecking their community. “Maybe we should have had better opsec,” the member said, harnessing the jargon of military and intelligence personnel for “operations security.” He insisted said he will not divulge OG’s identity or location to law enforcement until he is captured or can flee the United States. “I think I might be detained eventually. … I think there might be a short investigation on how I knew this guy and they’ll try to get something out of me. They might try to threaten me with prison time if I don’t reveal their identity.” To date, no federal law enforcement officials have contacted the young group member. Asked why he was prepared to help OG even at the risk of his own freedom, the young man replied without hesitation: “He was my best friend.” Wow. Great read and very believable. At least he impressed some kids on the internet. Assuming all the others were actually teens. Doesn’t sound like any met in person. So who knows who all were as they represented themselves on line? |
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Deplorable fan of liberty
“I don’t need a ride, I need more ammunition.” |
Originally Posted By 4xGM300m: The Ukrainians are flying comercial drones right over Russian EW stations but they are capable to jam JDAMs? Interesting,... View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Originally Posted By 4xGM300m: Originally Posted By AROKIE: Russian EW warfare has made leaps and bounds since the Iraq war. That is one area they have spent a ton of money on. they are pretty good at EW The Ukrainians are flying comercial drones right over Russian EW stations but they are capable to jam JDAMs? Interesting,... @4xGM300m You must have missed this article I posted yesterday. No they are not flying commercial drones anywhere close to what they used to do... https://news.yahoo.com/russia-now-effectively-counters-commercial-180000421.html |
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Only God will judge me.
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