A leak of top-secret US documents could have the potential to do serious damage to intelligence-sharing relationships with Australia and other allies, an expert tells Crikey.
The alleged culprit behind the Pentagon leak was arrested overnight in Massachusetts by an armed group of federal agents.
Footage from the arrest shows the man, identified in US media as 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard Jack Teixeira, being apprehended wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
Teixeira allegedly shared pictures of printed-out documents in a private chatroom on the gaming platform Discord over the past few months. The documents then spread to the message board 4chan, Russian Telegram channels, and other social media.
“The leaking of top-secret information, particularly top-secret information that includes intelligence seemingly compiled from multiple countries put together, is obviously very, very serious and can potentially do damage to very sensitive and trusted intelligence-sharing relationships,” Australian National University national security scholar William Stoltz told Crikey.
“It appears that there are details in the leaks that relate to quite practical and important details about operational planning in Ukraine, things like the expenditure of munitions, which would have been an immediate utility to Russian commanders in the field.
“It’s probably not a stretch to say that the leaking of this information has immediately put people’s lives at risk.”
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reportedly decided to alter some battle plans in the wake of the leak.
At least one of the documents mentioned Australian defence equipment being sent to Ukraine, although that bit of information has been shared openly by the Australian government and is not necessarily sensitive in itself.
“While the documents themselves may be classified top secret, not all the information contained in them is going to necessarily be at that level,” Stoltz said.
Stoltz qualified his remarks by acknowledging that the fact the documents appeared to have been accessed and leaked by a “maverick” US individual, rather than by a foreign intelligence agency, would likely give US intelligence partners some measure of relief.
“This is unfortunately just kind of par for the course of creating, sharing and handling secret information — while you can do absolutely everything to contain it … there’s always a human element that makes it not entirely secure at any point.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers told reporters in Washington, DC, earlier this week that he viewed the breach as “very serious”.
Chalmers was in the US capital for meetings with global counterparts, including one with Ukraine’s minister of finance.
Asked if he anticipated the leak would impact the meetings, Chalmers said: “That remains to be seen.”
“I mean, obviously that’s a very serious breach. We saw some of that analysis come to light publicly, but the conversations that I expect to have with my friend and counterpart from Ukraine [are] about the support that Australia is providing for the war effort.”
An anonymous official from a country from the Five Eyes — the intelligence-sharing network that includes the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — told CNN the leak was “alarming”.
Another Five Eyes official told CNN: “We expect the US to share a damage assessment with us in the coming days, but we cannot wait for their assessment. Right now we are doing our own … We are poring over these documents to figure out if any of the intelligence originated from our collection.”
A member of the Discord chat where the documents originated — named “Thug Shaker Central” — told The Washington Post the leaker, known as “OG” in the chat, had originally typed out the documents to share them, before eventually proceeding to share pictures of the material instead.
“If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member told the Post.
“There is a little bit of showing off to friends … as well as wanting to keep us informed.”
The Post story indicated some 300 documents may have been leaked to the chat.
The New York Times reported its journalists were able to link the leak to Teixeira because of clues left in the pictures, including the texture of a table and the pattern of floor tiles visible in the images, which could be linked to other photos posted online.
One of the early posts of the material outside the Discord chat was made by an anonymous 4chan user last Thursday.
“[Russia is] outnumbering Ukies on all fronts and Russia is only able to make marginal gains,” the person wrote alongside a picture of a document showing troop losses from both sides.
Another anonymous person, perhaps posing as an intelligence agent, replied: “Delete this now please. We will be able to find you from the crease pattern.”
The first poster replied “No”, and posted another supposed leaked document.
US Attorney-General Merrick Garland said Teixeira will be charged under a provision of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to remove or transmit classified national defence information, the Associated Press reported.
The US military and Justice Department have opened a joint investigation to get to the bottom of how the leak happened.
Australia’s Defence Chief Angus Campbell said earlier in the week the US had been “engaging with partners” to figure out how damaging the leak might be.
“This, by reports, is a serious leak,” Campbell said.
“It is being investigated seriously by US authorities, and they are engaging with partners in order to better understand the potential consequences of that information being released into the public.”
The good ol’ paradoxical USA. On the one hand we have a 21-year old National Guardsman with access to Top Secret documents. Apparently though (according to The Guardian) around 1.5 million Americans have that level of access. It’s also possible that Teixeira didn’t have that clearance but may have been on a list that the documents were emailed to. Either way – 1.5 million people with access to state-level secrets?
On the other hand the USA is the home of conspiracy theorists – people who are absolutely positively certain that their government is successfully keeping huge secrets from them.
If too much is classified as Top Secret, then too many people need to have access to it. They should classify sparingly, and give very limited access.
America have lots of secrets, and they try hard, (but obviously not hard enough), to keep them concealed, otherwise the rest of the World would know how much Lying and Hypocrisy exists in the top echelons.
Not saying this leaker guy isn’t an idiot, but seriously how did he have access as a cut-lunch commando to TS material?
The amount of stuff that is classified TS is stupid. I was told once that during WW2, there were only about a dozen pieces of info that were classified TS. Not sure whether that’s just a story, but still, it would seem that digitisation has made the problem so much bigger.
Looking at many of the documents is who was the US government keeping these secrets from? Not from the Russian government because they already know them. Not from the Ukrainian government because they already know them as well. Likewise with the several European governments.
Could it be that these are secrets to be kept from the US population?
Of course.
Apart from having to pay for the entire enterprise, what’s it got to do with them?
Calvin Coolidge said “The business of America is Business” – just before the Great Depression.
Fortunately it was rendered more accurate by the penultimate insertion of ‘War’ and hey-ho, the mills came alive with the sound, not of music, but things that go bang.
A security classification says nothing about who should be excluded, only who should be included.
Default-deny is a fairly basic principle.
Coverage of the leaked Imperial documents relating to its involvement in the war in the Ukraine has ignored two key points:
(1) as the informed commentators have long pointed out, Imperial America long sought and is now driving this war it wanted. Such is very clear from the extensive control of the United States over Ukrainian military operations.
(2) worse, the damage and casualties now being suffered by the Ukraine are due to the extension of the war by the US and NATO. As the Ukraine is clearly no longer capable of any serious defence, left to its own devices it would already have had to surrender, meaning the war would have ceased. Recall, that the US involvement in the Vietnam War likewise dramatically increased the damage, deaths, and duration of that war – that the United States LOST.
Those ‘enhanced pics’ could also be Powell’s WMD bases for the UN or Rick Deckard finding replicant reptile scales after a hard day of retirements.
“Treasurer Jim Chalmers told reporters in Washington, DC, earlier this week that he viewed the breach as “very serious”.” And the Assange distribution of top secret papers wasn’t???
So the Australian government officials know exactly which information has been released. Given this certainty what is the basis of their worry?