“Finding the original source of the leak is like tracing the epidemic back to patient zero.” Eliot Higgins is the founder bellingcat, The investigative platform that was the first to reconstruct how classified Pentagon documents were published online.
The source, then, is 21-year-old Jacques Teixeira, who posted the leaks from a private online group called Thug Shaker Central. But is it plausible that someone so young could gain access to secret files?
• We base ourselves on facts. We know he shared it with a few dozen teenage gaming friends on a private Discord server in an effort to impress them. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And above all it does not hurt ».
From the information we have so far, can we say that this is not a “high level” operation?
 «It doesn’t sound like a Russian operation or a detective (Detective, Mr. Dr) Driven by a perfect example, as in the case of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. It looks like someone trying to impress his friends on the internet. This is at least in relation to his behavior on the Internet, then obviously we need to understand if he took the files himself or if he received them from someone else. And the beauty is, according to Eric Toller, author of investigative work and director of research and training for the BellingcatAnd Mr. Dr) Speaking, the other users in the group weren’t impressed and didn’t take it seriously.
Circulating users we are talking about?
For a long time in popular culture, gamers fit into a geeks, geeks who spend hours in front of screens, exchanging gameplay styles with other users. However, in recent years, chat rooms dedicated to online gaming have become sources of government information, which could have serious national security consequences.”
When did these files start circulating on the net? And how many files are we really talking about?
The existence of the documents was first reported in The New York Times After a number of Russian Telegram channels shared five image files related to the invasion of Ukraine on April 5: one of them was found by Bellingcat Who discovered how it was modified. But according to what Arik was able to reconstruct, the first documents began to circulate months and months in advance. If we go back to patient zero, the answer is hundreds. Arik spoke to some of the people who were speaking: No one knows the exact number of documents, but they say there are hundreds and hundreds. And they say: It’s the tip of the iceberg of what people know.
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