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The military loved Discord for Gen Z recruiting. Then the leaks began
- solarkraft 3y agoNo way. A messaging platform that can be used to recruit soliders can also be used to leak military secrets? That's crazy.
- ilyt 3y agoIt's weird and extremely dishonest how they try to blame the platform instead of them hiring a knob (or I guess under-training them in the first place). I fear it will cause for more push for government spying on their people
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- morkalork 3y agoThen they would have to consider what beliefs said knob held that are red flags and that is a much bigger problem.
- dmix 3y ago? His motivations were pretty modest. This wasn't some ideological thing as far as we know. The only thing that could resemble a red flag was one of the discord people described him as anti-war, while working for the military. A pretty normal position for a 20yr old though.
- davidgerard 3y agohe was literally a neo-Nazi, OP
- dmix 3y agoI must have missed that.
- lolinder 3y agoCitation? What I've seen is that he probably leaked the documents to impress his friends and was racist. Not every racist is a neonazi, though, so if you have other information I'd love to see it.
- stametseater 3y agoIn common American parlance, "nazi" is becoming a slur for any racist/sexist/*ist/*phobe, and doesn't refer specifically to those with interest or sympathy for/with Nazi Germany.
- lolinder 3y agoThat may be how some people use it, but that doesn't mean we should put up with that usage. The Nazis slaughtered millions of people because of their ethnicity/religion/sexual orientation/what have you. To use that word to describe an immature group of friends who say racist things because they think it's edgy waters down the meaning of a very powerful word in a way that severely harms public discourse. If we're going to use the phrase "literally a neo-Nazi", I want to see swastikas or tattoos or something other than garden-variety hooliganism.
- thebooktocome 3y agoPlenty of usmil enlisted are anti-war. They’re the ones with skin in the game, after all.
- Izkata 3y ago20 years ago there were recruiters at my school bribing us to join because they'd pay 100% of our college tuition. Assuming they're still doing that, with costs going up I can imagine more people taking them up on it despite their viewpoints.
- scythe 3y agoThe story I've heard is that he leaked the documents to win an argument. He doesn't even appear to have seriously considered that they would travel far beyond his little Discord friend group. Of course, I could have misheard.
- ilyt 3y agoNo, they should probably just not have access in the first place. Like having files encrypted with keys of only people that coudl access it or something
- pibechorro 3y agoThis is exactly what this is about. They are trying to make legal mass drag net surveillance and censorship. The key here is legal, they are already doing it covertly. There are plenty of murmurs this was done on purpose to set the excuse in place for restrict act, etc. Do you use a vpn? 20 years or a million dollar fine. Do you use tor? How about encrypted email? Signal? Crypto currency? We look more like china everyday.
- barrysteve 3y agoIt was always part of the deal that "God's watching". You just had to believe it before, and now it's kind of literal. I'm not trying to hide and I don't want to see everybody's lives. When more people let go of hiding in humility, and do not want to see everything... we could manifest a new America, that didn't start in Plymouth. The increase of the (now electronic) overseers, makes us more like the 1600s New England. China is playing catch up.
- dustyharddrive 3y agoMost cryptocurrencies make dragnet surveillance super easy, barely an inconvenience.
- photochemsyn 3y agoJust file this in the bin marked government-corporate propaganda aimed at expanding the surveillance state and implementing China's approach to monitoring citizen communications on various platforms. The consolidated corporate media seems to believe that if this 21-year old leaker had all his communications monitored and was tagged with a constantly updated social credit score, he could have been flagged as a risk much earlier and these embarrassing documents about the scale of the US government's involvement in the Ukraine war could have been kept from the public. That's of course a profoundly anti-Bill-of-Rights authoritarian stance, maybe adopted because 'the ruling class in America hates our freedoms?' Lord forbid the Ukraine war end in some kind of negotiated settlement, that would mean Europe might lift sanctions on Russian gas, reducing the demand for LNG exports... as well as reducing the diversion of taxpayer dollars to bloated military-industrial contracts. > "U.S. LNG exporters boosted shipments to Europe by more than 137% in the first 11 months of 2022 from the same period in 2021..." https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-lng-exports-both-lifeline-drain-europe-2023-maguire-2022-12-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-lng-exports-both-... It's kind of astonishing how bad the Washington Post has gotten since Jeff Bezos bought it...oh and look, Discord uses Google Cloud, not AWS! Well that explains a lot.
- generic92034 3y ago> Lord forbid the Ukraine war end in some kind of negotiated settlement, that would mean Europe might lift sanctions on Russian gas, reducing the demand for LNG exports... as well as reducing the diversion of taxpayer dollars to bloated military-industrial contracts. You did not write that, but just to make it clear to people who do not know - there were no EU sanctions on Russian gas, but Russia cut off (most of) the supply unilaterally.
- scythe 3y agoA list of sanctions is available: https://eu-solidarity-ukraine.ec.europa.eu/eu-sanctions-against-russia-following-invasion-ukraine_en https://eu-solidarity-ukraine.ec.europa.eu/eu-sanctions-agai... Russian oil and coal are heavily sanctioned, but not gas. This may have caused the confusion. Bans on any fuels from Russia likely contribute to European demand for fuel from other countries.
- philsquared_ 3y agoNo surprise about modern media and their unoriginal uncreative titeling... X loved y and then z happend... Yawn.
- troydavis 3y agoSomewhere in the intelligence community, a new project just received unlimited funding: join as many Discord servers (and Slack instances, and…) as possible, idle, and log everything. Whether that requires 1,000 quietly idling accounts or 100,000 of them, there’s now enough motivation to pull it off.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoBold of you to assume they won't just be given access to a firehose of data. Money talks.
- troydavis 3y agoFor Discord, I think the perceived risk outweighs the benefit. Unlike a government contractor or large telecom conglomerate[1], Discord doesn’t have a business unit that serves governments enough to directly benefit. I think a more likely outcome is Discord ignoring accounts that they strongly suspect are operated by the US government, or not thoroughly investigating that possibility (so they never know enough to strongly suspect). Basically, willful ignorance. (Discord staff, if you’re reading this: add likely government accounts - including probable country - to https://discord.com/tags/transparency-reports https://discord.com/tags/transparency-reports and add a warrant canary for overly-broad requests to https://discord.com/safety/360044157931-working-with-law-enforcement https://discord.com/safety/360044157931-working-with-law-enf...) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWho says it needs to come from Discord? These aren't heavily encrypted communications. I don't know if it's still the case, but Discord used Google at one point. Enough said. The sheer scale of data generated means they are unlikely to ever successfully identify an account if that's their intent. Where's the difference between a consumer that joins a lot of servers versus a contractor who joins a lot of servers? Where's the difference between a consumer that joins a specific server and a contractor that joins a specific server? There isn't one as far as monitoring them goes, unless they're coming from IPs known to not be civilian IPs, which is an easily solved problem for anybody to not be discovered.
- yellow_lead 3y agoIt's humorous how incompetent US intelligence is that they give this access to a 21 year old, don't notice any data exfiltration by someone with presumably 0 technical skills, and take (weeks?) to catch the guy only after the leaks are made incredibly public.
- pibechorro 3y agoIncompetence or happy to let it happen.
- dehrmann 3y ago21-year-old males are notoriously immature. Cue a college party montage. There's a reason they pay more for car insurance until they're 25. Something about the prefrontal cortex. I believe Chelsea Manning was 23 when she leaked intel? I'd actually argue this is why the military wants recruits in the sweet spot when they're legally adults, but haven't fully developed their decision making. You just don't give them sensitive intel. You give them a gun and a CO.
- antibasilisk 3y ago>Something about the prefrontal cortex. It's worth pointing out that this is an artefact of nurture, not nature. Stunting of the development of the prefrontal cortex is worsening each decade. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-t...
- blown_gasket 3y agoAge is not a determination for what level of access someone is given. It's not technically difficult to take a picture with a smartphone even given that smartphones are not allowed in SECRET and TOP SECRET areas. Multi-function devices (ex: printer/scanner/fax combo) still exist. What is humorous is the vast amount of comments surrounding this event on HN that have no idea how security clearances, compartmentalization of information, federal and military law work.
- 3y ago
- H8crilA 3y agoThe military loved keyboards for typing. Then someone leaked information with a keyboard.
- hairofadog 3y agoYep, this. How is Discord in any way the problem here? The problem is that they had gave unvetted personnel access to military secrets, not which chat software was being used.
- scotty79 3y agoI really love how young people don't give a damn about old tropes. Like CLASSIFIED or something. Dude, secrets will get leaked. Stamping red capital letters on it, making up cringe words like treason that belong more in warhammer 40k than real world and punishing people by taking away their freedom for speaking won't change that. Leaked secrets is really your fault for even having them. If you can't ever have your thing in the open maybe you shouldn't be having it at all? No matter how many gray hairs you have and how nice your suit is. Young are way more resilient towards narrative verbal bs that kept our generation and previous in line.
- DangitBobby 3y ago> If you can't ever have your thing in the open maybe you shouldn't be having it at all? No matter how many gray hairs you have and how nice your suit is. Nice in theory, but doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny. I have secrets. Hundreds of them. Mostly passwords. And I mostly keep them secret because if I don't, naughty people will take the things I need from me or generally cause chaos for me and my family. You're absolutely right that young people are more likely to question traditional narratives, but they are less likely to have the context (or apply it, anyway) necessary to form a coherent narrative in its place, which will often lead you to at least some variation on a traditional narrative. I think where young people often do good by questioning authority is when a traditional narrative used to apply but in recent history no longer does for some reason or another. If you're an old, you've likely already mentally examined some idea or process and found it to be sound, and now you're less likely to come back and question it later. Young people come along later and question it and find it to not be sound anymore, and the olds realize they might be right. For most other things... You don't have to be young to smell the bullshit.
- scotty79 3y agoThose are secrets because only you know them. And that's fine. What's not fine is that you could have organisational shared secret in this day and age that won't ever leak. That's dumb fantasy and attempts at making it real are laughable and should have holes poked into them. > You're absolutely right that young people are more likely to question traditional narratives, but they are less likely to have the context (or apply it, anyway) necessary to form a coherent narrative in its place, which will often lead you to at least some variation on a traditional narrative. How strongly narratives affected people historically is downright frightning. Millions have died because of philosophers. I hope that in the future humanity will gain much more relislience toward narratives just by tearing them apart and restiching in chaotic competeing manners. I hope LLMs will help with that by examplifying how easy it is to produce any bs narrative that even hunk of silicon can do it. I hope people who grow up in this environment will no longer be able to be cheated by single bs narrative for decades of their life. > For most other things... You don't have to be young to smell the bullshit. The fact you can smell it doesn't matter you'll have audacity to complain about the smell or imagine a world without this smell or even find that smell bad enough to get off the couch.
- barrysteve 3y agoSo how do you square this, with the Assange and Snowden witch hunts? Making an example of them didn't stop the next generation leaking whenever they wanted.
- jmyeet 3y agoIt's hard to keep a secret. It's what gives me confidence that there are no alien UFOs. Let me give you some examples: 1. Someone leaks classified plane specs to win argument on an Internet forum [1]; 2. US soldiers leak nuclear secrets via website for creating flash cards [2]; and 3. Fitbit app Strava gives away location of secret military base [3]. There's of course no way of convincing conspiracy theorists. They'll probably point to the above and call them fake or a psy op. The way simpler explanation is that pretty much nothing remains secret and that probability keeps going down the more people that know it. I once heard it said it would be harder to fake the Moon landing than actually land on the Moon given all the people involved. Anywa, Discord is just the next evolution of that. [1]: https://kotaku.com/military-game-fan-leaks-classified-docs-to-win-forum-ar-1847309348 https://kotaku.com/military-game-fan-leaks-classified-docs-t... [2]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expose-nuclear-weapons-secrets-via-flashcard-apps/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos... [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
- antibasilisk 3y agoWell if you take a laissez-faire attitude to raising the next generation, allow corporations to fry their brains, turn them into lonely monsters grasping at anything to feel ok, it shouldn't really be a surprising that putting them in front of classified information will come back to bite you. Most zoomers don't want to join the military (if they're even mentally well enough to join in the first place) because the government actively made an enemy of the people, the fact that anyone is still signing up is more surprising than the fact that someone leaked something.