Military plane suspected to have originated from The Pentagon leaks chat room files and circulates for a month before officials are notified.

The Pentagon of the United States (data map)

Overseas Network, April 11 (Xinhua) According to reports from the Associated Press, the Washington Post and other US media on the 10th, the leak of military documents from the Pentagon in the United States is suspected to have originated from the online game chat room Discord. The U.S. Department of Justice was not involved in the investigation until at least a month after the classified documents were circulated on Discord chatroom servers.

Discord is an online chat and social platform for games. Dozens of pages of images of classified Pentagon documents were shared on a Discord chat room server on February 28 and March 2, the report said. Bellingcat, an open source intelligence investigation website, stated that at the time of the incident, several players on Discord had a brief quarrel over the Russia-Ukraine issue, and then a game user replied, “Here are some leaked documents” and attached 10 documents about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. documents, some of which are marked “Top Secret”.

The leaked documents did not attract widespread attention in the weeks after they were released, and it was not until they were widely reposted on social media and reported by the media that they alerted US officials.

Discord chat room members interviewed declined to say whether the person who posted the leaked document worked for the U.S. government, saying the poster had no motive to spread government secrets and that he was posting only to impress members of the gaming community. In addition, the poster said that he had copies of “more than hundreds of pages” of classified documents. If he was arrested, more military secrets would be made public.