As we reported earlier, a series of allegedly confidential documents of the US intelligence services, mentioning details about the war in Ukraine and information about US spying on other countries, have been leaked on the Internet in recent days. The leaks, as detailed by ABC News, were allegedly made by a single person on a Discord app server.
Discord is a popular app among the gaming community that has 150 million users worldwide and is organized by servers. Any user can create a server or join one created by another user, although it is possible to limit who can access them.
The leaks of U.S. documents were originally allegedly made on a server of a youtuber who has 243,000 subscribers and deals with content such as politics, religion and philosophy.
After the name of the Discord became publicly known, on April 7, the channel (thematic chats of the servers) where the images (scans) of the leaked documents were uploaded was deactivated. For the time being, the server remains active, although all its members are now commenting on the information found in the leaked documents.
So far, the origin of the leaked documents is unknown, although, according to ABC News, an archived tweet from a suspended Twitter account, allegedly belonging to the original author of the leaks, claims that this user “found information from a now-banned server and passed it” to the youtuber’s Discord server. Below, we detail the chronology of the dissemination of the documents.
Chronology of U.S. document leaks
February: A user of a youtuber’s Discord server allegedly shares the first of 107 scanned images of possible documents, according to researcher Aric Toler of investigative journalism website Bellingcat.
February 24: On the Discord server, reference is made to the leaked U.S. documents.
March 1 and 2: More images appear on the youtuber’s Discord server. 38 of them have already been reviewed by ABC News.
March 4: Ten of the images are re-shared on a separate Discord server dedicated to the video game Minecraft.
April 5: Three images appear on 4chan, a popular image board-type website on the Internet. Another five appear in Telegram messages from a pro-Russian channel. In addition, another of the images contains clear indications of manipulation to inflate Ukrainian casualty figures and reduce Russian ones.
April 6: The New York Times reveals the existence of the alleged leaked documents.
April 7: The Discord channel on which possible documents were shared is publicly identified. On the same day, the channel deletes the images, bans use of the channel and begins restricting access to the server.
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