A young man in his mid-twenties who worked on a military base, regular user of the Discord server. While for a few days classified American documents on the war in Ukraine have been published on social networks, the Washington Post reveals in investigation published on Wednesday April 12 of the first elements on the identity of the author of the leak. Leader of an online group of about 20 people – mostly men – passionate about “guns, military equipment and God”, the one who calls himself “OG” is said to have regularly published for months hundreds pages copied from documents from the military base where he worked, according to the American daily.
According to one member of this group interviewed by the Washington Post, OG reportedly spent at least part of his day in a secure facility prohibiting cell phones and other electronic devices, in order to avoid the transmission of secret information hosted on government computer networks or extracted from printers. After having initially copied these documents by hand, OG would have, faced with the magnitude of the task, taken photos to send them to his group.
“He’s a smart person”
Some featured detailed maps of the battlefield in Ukraine as well as satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian power installations. Others sketched the potential trajectory of North Korean nuclear ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. This information, extremely sensitive, was sometimes marked “NOFORN”, that is to say not to be disclosed to strangers, advances the Washington Post. “He is a smart person, he knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, so it was not about accidental leaks”, affirms one of the members of his group on Discord daily.
Initially, OG allegedly asked his friends online not to spread the documents, not wanting to be a whistleblower. Endowed with a gloomy view of government, the young man simply wanted to inform his companions of the excesses of American law enforcement and intelligence, which he perceived “as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in ignorance,” reports the Washington Post. OG claimed, for example, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist was going to carry out a shooting in a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022, killing 10 in total, all of them black. The individual would also show some violence, evidenced by a video seen by the Washington Post, in which the latter would shout a series of racist and anti-Semitic insults before firing several bullets at a target in a shooting range.
A widespread leak
If the members of the group for the most part respected the instructions of their “leader”, another teenage user however began to publish several dozen photos showing classified documents on another Discord server on February 28. On March 4, confidential information thus appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map”, a server focused on the popular video game of the same name, before being shared later on Twitter or Telegram. The leak, however, did not come to the attention of US authorities until a month later.
Since then, OG has stopped sharing documents, and would have moved its community to another server to communicate with it. The Pentagon has launched an investigation, saying the case poses a “very serious” risk to US national security. US officials have indeed hinted in the press that many of these documents are genuine. OG “seemed very confused and lost as to what to do,” one of the band members told The Washington Post. “He is fully aware of what is happening and the possible consequences. He just doesn’t know how to resolve this situation.” In his final message to his companions, OG urged them to “keep a low profile and delete any information that may relate to him,” he added. This included all copies of classified documents that OG had shared. In vain, given the widespread dissemination on social networks.