It Could Happen Here - The Very Stupid Man Who Stole Army Secrets to Impress Gamers

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

The gang talks about the hundreds of top secret defense department documents that just got leaked by a weird fascist gamer trying to impress teenagers on Discord.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or whenever you get your podcasts. star and podcast host Jenny Garth. You have to learn to live with yourself and allow yourself to be devastated. Sometimes you can get through it and there is always something on the other side that's waiting for you. Listen to the bright side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. get your podcasts. It's It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today, I'm happy that we're recording this right now, James and Garrison, because we all just got a historic example of something falling apart. Elon Musk's big silly rocket.

We're recording this about a day or so after it exploded in midair over the Gulf Coast, showering a turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a fun news item. That's comically perfect. It is pretty cool. Yeah. Unless it crash landed in a kitten farm, that couldn't really be much more perfect. No, I mean, what's nice is that it's given me,

it's made me feel young again. Because when I was a wee lad, I was attending a speech debate rally in Cooper, Texas, when the last space shuttle to explode exploded directly over us, blowing out a bunch of the windows in the building um and raining yeah yeah it was uh it was it was yeah so i whenever whenever a space shuttle explodes over of some sort explodes over texas i get powerful nostalgia yeah well they uh what

did they slip the surly buns of earth to blow out the windows in a high school in cuba texas that's that's how the line goes it makes me think of all the other things I was doing that day, which was namely playing Lord of the Rings Risk in a high school gym, as we were wont to do. Great game. One of the better Risk covers. What are we talking about today? Friendos?

Buddies? Chuckle pals. Yeah, we're talking about... We're talking about one man having a fun time on discord.com. I guess, yeah. Doing the human equivalent of being a spaceship that explodes in the sky. Yes.

I suppose discord's not really a.com It's more of an application now But yes, it is Discord, an app that I am permanently banned from Wait, what? What did you do to Discord, James? What did you do to get banned from Discord? You know who's on Discord, right?

Between the worst fucking people on Earth. All of the worst people. Yeah, no, we tried to start a Discord for the fundraising live show, and I tried with several emails, and every time it came back with ban evasion. Wow. That is extremely funny, James. Yeah, I posted a video of my chickens, and it has never forgiven me. Wow.

Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent and they were technically naked so i think it does count as revenge point my chickens are always close man they were a little chicken pants oh yeah you're one of the pansies the there's a big conflict in chicken owners and james has taken a side so we're talking this week about the discord leaks and this is one of those things we came into this kind of debating how much detail to go into. But when we brought this up, like, this is something that Gare, James, and I is like a major thing in our bubble for the last, like, week. So we've all been following it. But when we brought this up in the work chat, Danil had no idea that this had gone on. So we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of what, what people are calling the largest leak of top secret us,

uh, military and defense data, um, since, you know, uh, Snowden. Um,

so we're, we're, we're going to go over all of that right now. I think I want to start by talking about an MMORPG called war thunder. Uh, this is a, can you break down MMORPG for those of us? It's like World of Warcraft. It's a big video game that you play online with a bunch of strangers.

It's a free game. You use like modern military weapons to like fight other players. And it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic renderings and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern tanks and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels. Right. So. And it's it's it's like it's it's a game for war nerds, right? Like there's you utilize like radar in a way that's broadly realistic like if you shoot you know if one tank shoots at another the the tank's weaponry works the way it's supposed to in the real world the armor is vulnerable where it's vulnerable in the real world and this is like the appeal to the kind of nerds who play this game um and as you might guess from a bunch of people who really want to like

in the most realistic way possible uh render and fight each other with modern military vehicles a significant number of these dudes are members of various different like defense departments right uh or at least are employed in some degree of various different national military forces uh several different as a result like when arguments happen you know with any mmorpg if you're playing like world of warcraft right and like something gets nerfed or something isn't working as well as it's supposed to you'll get these like massive threads in the forums where people are like arguing about how something needs to be changed or changed back or how there's a glitch or whatever and because war thunder is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online,

it's often like, well, you know, the F-15 shouldn't work this way, it should work this way and people will get into arguments about that and then someone will, as happened like a couple of weeks ago, I think, someone will post sensitive information about the F-15 Strike Eagle

in order to like prove that it would function the way that they are arguing it should function in this forum debate. That happened earlier this year. And I think with the F-15, it wasn't technically top secret information. It was information that U.S. citizens were allowed to have, but not allowed to post online because that's a violation of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs the export essentially of military information and technology. But on another situation, I think like a year or so ago, information about, I believe the F-22 was posted that was extremely sensitive, that was like top secret. And these are, again, like some dude who's got some sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks that the right way

to use it is arguing about the video game War Thunder. These are not just Americans. I want to be clear about that. In July of 2021, there was a player arguing about a challenger to tank who claimed to have been a former tank commander with the british army and he shared information from the army equipment support publication the information had been labeled unclassified but it was actually classified and other lakes have been a little more galling. A French army soldier leaked information on the Leclerc main battle tank that was top secret. And a Chinese user leaked capabilities of the Chinese army's DTC 10 125 millimeter anti-tank round that should not have been leaked. So this shit keeps happening in War Thunder. It's like a joke.

Like the War Thunder account when these discord leaks happened a week or so ago like joked about it um like the thing that the game is known for yeah is these like different people in different national defense apparatus can't stop themselves from like leaking stop secret info about vehicles it's very funny i guess the only reason i know why war thunder exists i think it's the only reason why we know a decent amount of what like what by we here and meaning like i guess uh like western militaries know which of course we are all members of uh know about like russian main battle tanks it's from war thunder leaks it's very funny yeah and you have to assume i would be surprised if no one had tried just like having, you know, an agent from a national security agency in, uh,

trying to like be like trying to like provoke arguments about Chinese tanks or whatever. I'd be shocked if that hasn't happened. Yeah. Um, like the overlap between like people who might play war thunder anyway, and people who might work for a national security agency, like venn diagrams are a circle yeah exactly um so it's one of those things where this happens a bunch on war thunder but it's just kind of something people

joke about because these leaks like they're meaningful i guess to like militaries care about them but like you sitting at home you hear like oh hey details of like the couple of construction of a of the new abrams like models has leaked that that's not like the same as i don't know chelsea manning leaking information about like war crimes by the u.s military in iraq or or edward snowden leaking info about like the nsa like it's a little less relevant to most people. What we started seeing a couple of weeks ago is documents, top secret label documents, like actual pictures of straight up unredacted, top secret U.S. Defense Department documents, just kind of filtering out over various discords. And they were kind of appearing in random little bits. You'd see one that was like

an update on the war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that the U.S. military had about the ability of the Ukrainian military to carry out the counteroffensive that everybody's expecting in the near future. You have like casualty estimates from the U.S. military. Another document that was leaked had like a bunch of information inside the russian general staff um so these are number one very serious leaks right you're talking about especially with the leaks from inside putin's uh kind of inner circle you're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major u.s source inside the russian government uh and you're also talking about leaks that just kind of reveal the degree to which

the CIA has an enormous amount of information, apparently, at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin, you know, so these are very significant leaks. But they didn't appear, they weren't being like, you know, kind of filtered out and released by an agency like WikiLeaks. They weren't being sent to journalists. They were just kind of showing up in these, you know, Discord is basically a series of chat rooms, and they were just kind of showing up in different Discords. So this is, you know, a mystery, and it's the kind of mystery that, like, a certain kind of person who is extremely online is not going to be able to get out of their head and is going to

kind of try to trace back to its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery, the nerd who could not get it out of their head and decided to trace it back to its origin was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Toller. Eric is a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled researcher that I've ever met in my life. And, you know, Eric started seeing these like everyone else, these top secret documents and was like, where the fuck are these coming from? And this is one of those things we'll talk about. It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people in the day since. in the day since. But when this kind of started, number one, you can't really deny there was an intense public interest in figuring out what the origin point of these was, because that was the only way to figure out, are these actual leaks? When you see something that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly on the internet, if you call up the US government and you say,

hey, is this real top secret info they're not gonna say yes right like you don't get that response from them i mean and especially right now with all of like the ai chat generation tools generating fake documents is one of the main things people are doing for disinfo generating like fake sources fake documents of course you can like edit things further to like make them seem more realistic but yes that you have you would as someone who is extremely curious is going to wonder if this is actually like a real thing or if this is just some like bullshit prank or something and there were edits of these documents did also go viral in fact tucker carlson one of the one of the original documents shows kind go viral. In fact, Tucker Carlson, one of the original documents shows kind of US estimates for killed in action on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side

in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is consistent with all previous reporting. But the edit of it showed something like many times as many Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is something that was valuable for the people who are trying to argue that like this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians. Guys like Tucker Carlson, who covered the leaks on his show and knowingly used the fake edit of the leak. I can't imagine he I have to assume it was knowingly because it had been very well exposed by that point. So there's really no other explanation, I think. But anyway, the fact that there were edits of these documents that were not legitimate going around is just kind of part of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying to figure out where the

fuck are these things coming from? Ericic is again uh an extremely good researcher um and through a mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of like calling up people and talking to them he found what appeared to be the source of these leaks uh which was an invitation only clubhouse on discord of like 30 ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it kind of became clear that this group was a bunch of kind of young people who had gotten together during the pandemic to talk about, you know, games. These guys are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in high school. They kind of were cut off from their friends so they wanted a place to be social they would share memes including like extremely racist you know borderline nazi shit uh they would like watch movies over and like chat over kind of the voice app um they

were all what you call trad cats which is like basically weirdo catholic fundamentalists um like i think a lot of them deny vatican too that sort of shit um it's it's like a whole thing a lot of them were that at least so there was a lot of like praying and anyway a bunch of weirdos uh and the head of this group of weirdos was the oldest of them a guy who was known on like in the discord as OG. And OG he's was, you know, in the land of the teenagers, the person in their early twenties who can buy an AR 15 is king. And so this guy, this guy is in his early twenties. He's in the military, which he talks about.

He posts videos of himself like shooting guns and like, you know, saying racial slurs and like signposting to these like, you know, weird memes and stuff that they're all into, which to them, like, makes him seem extremely cool. Right. It's one of those things when you kind of read the different coverage of this, it's there's a little bit of like weird culty stuff going on um i i don't know if i'd say that it was a cult in in more than just like every discord server is a cult exactly the insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects of cult dynamics right yeah Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls

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Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, everybody. Robert here. We had a little audio error, obviously, in the recording. I wanted to clarify this section because it was kind of garbled. The name of the Discord server they were in was Thug Shaker Central, which is potentially a reference to one of a couple of things. You'll find some disagreement about this online, but it's not really relevant. That's the Discord name that they worked under. That's the Discord name that they worked under.

You get like the overall point of this. It's a bunch of like kids who are fans of games. They're fans of like this YouTuber Oxide. It's like a little group of dudes who got together via fandom and the pandemic and over the course of years developed like a shared culture. And part of the shared culture is this guy, OG, who's the older one of them, you know, trying to keep them aware of what he thought was important about kind of global politics. And that particularly included aspects of like battlefield conditions in Ukraine, information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind of stuff that he had access to because spoilers, he was in an air national guard wing as an intelligence. And like he was in the intelligence sector of like an air national guard ring. And he had a security classification, right? And once this all got revealed, people are like, why the fuck is a 21 year old because that's this

guy's age, have access to top secret data data and everyone who knows anything about the way our our government classifies information was like most of the people have access it are like 20 yeah it invites our wars 50 year olds yeah like i think it just genuinely like you know like if we've been around war and conflict and the people who do it quite a lot i think most people would be genuinely blown away that most people doing it are children yeah and this has caused like obviously some problems before for the defense uh department but it's also like it's kind of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce are always going to be young kids these are spoilers shitty jobs often um and uh that's the only one

who will do a lot of them and also just like if you're fighting a war most of the people you have that are going to be tasked with field intelligence are going to be in this age range so it's not at all weird that this guy had access to this shit um what is weird is that so he starts off kind of like arguing you know uh sometimes he'll bring up stuff that he knows that's from classified documents while he's arguing about the war in Ukraine or whatever with his friends online. And then he starts doing like a series of regular updates where he'll basically type out details from like a bunch of different top secret documents and these massive long and apparently kind of hard to read um posts and he'll just like post them into the chat uh to kind of keep his friends abreast of what he thinks is you know important but he gets frustrated over time that like they're not reading this shit because it's really boring and like kind of weird to just info top secret info um and they don't these kids

don't again like these other folks are like in high school they don't really realize where he's getting the info or what he has but they do the folks who do pay attention recognize over time that like stuff will happen in the real world that corresponds to something he posted a couple of weeks ago and they're like wow he seems to have like actually really good information um eventually og gets frustrated because he's not no one's paying attention to his posts so he starts taking photos of just the top secret documents themselves and posting them in the discord deck amazing now this is unbelievably illegal yeah he really crossed a line there and just unbelievably dumb by the way it was illegal before but this is really illegal in terms of like allowing yourself making it so much easier for the

consequences you're fucking around to to find you like that he crossed the rubicon right there yeah and and and now we have to face the hard question. Is this guy an illegalist king or is he more problematic? And this is the question that we have to actually focus on now. Take care of yourself. Stop. Because it is on one hand pretty funny. It's extremely funny. There's zero argument there among people who aren't shitheads. It's very funny.

Yeah. It's very funny that like he could be doing an illegalism without with with zero intention of doing so now i i do think there's a some people have kind of errantly called him a whistleblower which is not that's not accurate that is not what he's doing he's a nazi who's posting top secret information to impress children online that's right garrison i do think we have to i think we have to let's let's um um dig into that a little bit because a whistleblower is somebody who exposes information from inside of an organization um for some sort of purpose right they believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that like,

they believe there's some sort of public interest in information that is being kind of siloed inside of an organization that they're a part of, and they release that organization, right? Fundamentally, that's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his friends in this 30 person discord, do not post these anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share. This is just for your eyes, because we're friends, right um he does not intend for this to get out um but here's the thing all of his friends in this group are like dumb kids and just like those people on war thunder they start getting into arguments with people outside of the discords yet and other discords discords one of them is a fan discord for some other youtuber one of them is the discord is a minecraft discord

and we get into arguments with random other users about like the war in ukraine and stuff and when they're having those arguments they'll hear someone make a point and they'll think back to a top secret document that og posted and they they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong because I've seen like some some CIA like satellite footage that like shows that this isn't accurate. And rather than being like, well, I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the Internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to being imprisoned for a decade. They they just grab top secret documents that he posted and they post them in these other discords and that's how this shit breaks containment right um now it's one of those things i do want to note that like these are not generally speaking super pleasant people

um og is the kind of guy who like one of his big arguments that he tries to like make to these kids. He like claims that based on the top secret info he has, which he posts nothing that proves this, the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by that Nazi at that majority, you know, black frequented grocery store, that that was like a government plot to institute gun control and shit. It was a false flag. So he's not just posting good. He's like lying here too, because obviously there's no intelligence to post backing that up. He just, he's just kind of trying to, it's a mix of, he's trying to like prove that, you know, he's trying to make arguments about

like what's happening, you know, in, in various various overseas conflicts using us intel but he's also just like spreading different kind of uh conspiracy theories that he has to these kids who are by and large looking up to him um there's a couple like the washington post has done some some really deep reporting where they talk to some of these kids who they're like yeah man we loved him like when he realized this shit had broken containment he like called us and we were all crying because we knew he was going to go to prison like there they seem legitimately distraught

yeah there's like lines like he said something had happened and he prayed to God that this event would not happen but now it's in God's hands so these are like these are like weirdo ashy kids I hesitate to like condemn like the literal children too much because they're very vulnerable this guy is like a bad as early 20s yeah this guy is a bad person

who is deeply like in a very fucked up way influencing this group of like 30-ish teenagers on the internet um in his like weird politics it's not great now that's separate from the question of like is there a value to these leagues which we can talk about in a little right but so as we've talked about eric toller tracks down where this is happening tracks down like the name og publishes a piece on bellingcat it's sort of ripped off by like i don't know a dozen like every other newspaper uh in world. And then additional reporting is done. Bellingcat and the New York Times team up and they eventually like track down and publish an article on who this guy is, an airman named Jack Teep-Sara. And they publish an article about that about a day before this guy gets arrested by the FBI.

And it's one of those things, one of the if you if you look at the FBI affidavit, it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this guy down and found him because they did so, you know, using the resources they had before the Times did. Online, people have been going after the Times and Eric for like, revealing this guy to the government, which before the times did online. People have been going after the times and Eric for like revealing this guy to the government, which is, is not the case. Basically once it became clear what had gotten leaked the FBI, because they have access to, you know, the systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive

compartmented information found out who had most recently, like on the days that kind of correspond to the leaks pulled up information about that and narrowed it down uh to this guy jack um they they like it and they they were they had access to like one of the things they did is they called discord and talked to discord and discord helped them track down where the leaks were originating from. And then because they could see that the account that had posted, you know, the top secret data originally was a paid account, they were able to like provide the FBI with this guy's home address and shit. This

is exactly what you'd expect for the FBI. Yeah, I mean, the FBI has a lot of non-open source means to do this type of investigation. Yeah, they are not doing what Eric is doing and just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from. Like they have, they are the FBI. They have access to other things. And it's what you'd expect from Discord too, right? Like they

will comply with whatever. Yes, absolutely. These are top secret like if they don't have a legal choice here, they're a gigantic company. They're going to comply. So this is the kind of thing where like one of the there's this big argument. I don't even know if it's big, but there's definitely like a weird chunk of the left that has like leaned on because the right has immediately started calling this guy a whistleblower. Fucking Marjorie Taylor Gre green was like he's a christian and he's a leaker trying to expose crucial details about our government and like

no he wasn't he was like trying to fucking groom some teenagers and they posted it without his permission and a lot of a lot of the more conspiracy type stuff is like a trying to call out like uh you know it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it seem like the U S is doing things that are wrong and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much. And it kind of, it plays into this weird, weird thing that people have against the way Biden's been handling the,

the geopolitics around the russian invasion and it's like it it plays into a whole bunch of right-wing talking points we've seen around russia you know we've seen this type of stuff get talked about uh by tucker carlson quite often yeah there's a there's a whole bunch of like little nodes that this that this touches on and we even see we even see stuff like that among like you know people who are uh authoritarian communists right who are who are still pro-russia despite russia not being a communist country um but but still like being like oh they're you know this is something he's trying to expose the the the things that are we people are doing wrong to Russia. And it's like, okay, all right.

Yeah. Yeah. And to me, it's one of the, and there's also, you've gotten among some chunks of this attitude that like, well, you know, I don't care why he did it or like what he is in his personal life. Any leak, you know, of the U.S. military machine is good and should be, you know, protected. And it's like, for one thing, this guy, like nobody knew where these things were coming from.

There was a vested need in sort of figuring out what the origin point was to figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing, I don't know, man, you can argue about like what point, you know, the digging, whether or not like the, the, it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source. I would argue that like people also have a right to know if there's some sort of fucking, like, like if the documents were fake or altered in some way, there was a reason to be trying to figure out the providence of this shit,

but more to the point, like I think it's good to have access to like data from inside of our military. I think that's, that's broadly positive. And I, when I look at these data or when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think most of it's, you know, one of the concerns that's always, that always exists when you're talking about a leak of data is like, is this going to expose like potentially innocent people, um, to any kind of harm? And there is a potential for that with some of this, because some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the upcoming offensive. And like, well, like, I don't really care if some guy inside the Kremlin, who's like a member of the

Russian general staff and a double, I don't care if that guy like something bad happens to him. He's probably not a great dude. But, but I do care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldiers potentially getting harmed. Now, I will say, from what I can tell from this, I think the odds of that are pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of the timetable for the counter offensive, but I don't know that it's, I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed things in a way that's like going to cause loss of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to whether or not that might happen. But also, while I think it's accurate to say, I'm not saying evidence that a lot of people's safety have been harmed by these leaks.

It's also not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning did, right? Again, Manning revealed videos like the collateral murder video, evidence of like breakdowns of order and things that I think are accurate to call war crimes that were being kind of hidden by our government. Whereas Snowden revealed intense details about an NSA spying program, all of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of this is just kind of like wonky in inside baseball military stuff. Which again, I'm not like sad that it's gotten out, but it's also not, it really does seem like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled out based on

his own kind of like weird interests. It's not, there's not like a strong unifying theme around them. And again, most of it's most of it's shit. That's not going to be interesting to the average person. One of the documents I just read an article about because like, we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now. Right. There's been there's like the Post and the Times

seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked, but they haven't published anything because, you know, they're reading through it and, you know, actually reporting it out. One of the articles that just came out was about the fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish-led self-administration in northeast Syria, to Rojava, to the SDF, in order to talk about the potential for them attacking Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. When this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter, it's often been like described as, oh, the Ukrainians were going to team up with the Kurds who attacked Russia in Syria, like, like this was an actual like serious plan, which is actually the document, it seems a lot less inciting than that. Basically, what happened was some folks on the Ukrainian general

staff or whatever were like looking into the possibility, hey, you know, is there any way that we could kind of anything we could pay the Kurds over in Syria to carry out an attack on the Russians? And apparently they had access to somebody who claimed to be in the SDF, at least. And that person was like, we might be able to do something if you can get us some anti-air defenses, right? Which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful anti-air defenses to northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered on all sides. There is some stuff, if you're a walk in the region, there's some interesting stuff about

this, which is that the SDF basically responded like we could potentially do this. We couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of the self-administration. We couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of the self-administration. Russians are acting as peacekeepers there between Turkey and its kind of desire to invade the entire region. They're not great as peacekeepers. The Armenians will tell you that Russian soldiers are not great peacekeepers. But the SDF didn't want to like shit where they were eating. Right. So there was some like debate about where they might be able to attack. One of the things that is really interesting about this leak is that apparently Ukraine like talk to Turkey about this,

because obviously the Turks consider the core of the SDF, the YPG, to be a terrorist organization. But when Ukraine was talking to them, they're like, hey, we might basically bribe these people to carry out an attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like, OK, well, don't do it here, here, here, because that's kind of close to some of our guys. Like that, that part is interesting. But again, none of this matters all that much because nothing. As far as we know, in December, Zelensky was like, no, don't proceed with looking into this. This is the kind of thing like the U.S. military has like plans for what happens if we have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing defense departments do. And as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that went much further than like a series of phone calls. Right. Which, by the way, the SDF denies ever happened. I don't

know what exactly occurred. I don't know if it's hard for me to tell did the ukrainians were they talking to someone who was actually a representative of the sdf's like military hierarchy or was this like some guy that they thought was because maybe ukraine doesn't have great context into the like or did the u.s and it's it's not kind of clear did the u.s maybe like hook them up with somebody um but it doesn't like at the at the end of the day you can argue i as someone who follows the region i find this kind of interesting it's not exactly like uh groundbreaking you know uh in its importance because nothing happened no one did anything this is like some guys in ukraine thought about doing a thing and then decided not to which is is, you know, potentially interesting context, but we're not talking about the Manning or the Snowden leaks here. Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's that particular document,

I think is kind of it. Clearly, they have access to people who have formerly fought in Syria with the YPG, right? There are there are probably dozens of them now fighting in Ukraine with other volunteer units. Like it's, it's not hard to see how this thought came up, but like you said, nothing really happened. It was just some people like spitballing. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-ch chilling brushes with supernatural creatures take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted latin america since the beginning of time listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app.

Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now. And I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. So, I don't know. There's some other bits and stuff in here

that are kind of interesting. One of them was there was a document in there about how the U.S. had kind of interfered in peace negotiations in Yemen due to like kind of concerns that they had about the fact that China was kind of brokering a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels and between the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat shady shit from the U.S. in there. But at the end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations. It's just like, yeah, and a lot of it's like that, where it's kind of like, this is useful context. I'm

glad historians or journalists reporting it out will have that. But at the end of the day, like the fact that like, oh, hey, at one point in these peace negotiations, the U.S. was like, you know, being kind of a dick isn't exactly, like, shocking, you know? It's not going to, like, change your overall concept of what's happening over there. It's not stuff that, like, is – most of it's not stuff that's, like, massively important. It is really interesting, the detail that our defense establishment apparently has from within the Russian government. I do think it's worth noting, because when we talk about sort of the provenance

of these and the reliability of these leaks as they regard the war in Ukraine, there's been a lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals that Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry out a counter offensive or that the war has gone much worse for them than they think. It is kind of worth noting that like prior to the expanded Russian invasion, all U.S. military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was going to fold in a matter of days. So even though a lot of this is top secret info, that doesn't mean it's like a hundred percent accurate,

right? Like our guys, like think back to the Iraq war, our dudes get shit wrong constantly. So it is, again, this is all really interesting. And I will say two things.

I think it's very funny that this, this guy nuked his entire life, basically to impress children on a discord. I think it's extremely funny. I have laughed many a time at this. I also think it's like, as someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting and good that we have this context. I don't think any of this is like massively surprising or shocking. or shocking. The shit that's in that defense industry or a defense intelligence agency analysis of the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that you would know if you were

paying attention to the good OSINT aggregators who have been covering the war and if you've been just reading good reporting on what's going on over there. I'll read a little bit of a summary from an article that's kind of going over some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked. One details information apparently obtained through U.S. eavesdropping on Russia's foreign intelligence service and suggests that China approved the provision of lethal aid to Russia in its war in Ukraine early this year and planned to disguise its military equipment as civilian items. Another includes details of a test conducted by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles, the DF-27 hypersonic glide vehicle. On February 25th, it says the vehicle flew for 12 minutes across 1,300 miles and that it possessed a high probability of penetrating U.S. ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed Killeen-23 by U.S.

intelligence agencies that earlier this year flew over the United States. They detail sophisticated surveillance equipment. U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons, the documents say in another previously unreported revelation. And so let's kind of break that down. One thing we have here is basically an argument from the U.S. that based on their intercepts, they believe that China has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry to Russia and disguising it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this. It means that there's SIGINT that someone in our government

has that says that they were. That could be disinformation from them. It could be out of date. It could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting. I would say if you are a defense industry reporter, it's something that should definitely spur you to further reporting because that's really relevant if that's occurring. But it's not the final word on the matter. Meanwhile, you've got this thing

on like, yeah, this hypersonic missile the Chinese have is good at shooting shit, theoretically. This is the kind of thing that's interesting, and I think is probably more accurate than talking about China providing lethal aid, because you can kind of – theoretically, you're looking at actual like data on how the missile has performed. It just seems like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But this is, again, to kind of contrast it with like the Snowden and Manning leaks. Well, what do you do if like the NSA is spying on people? Well, you could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their ability to do that, right? What do you do if there have been like war crimes committed by your military that

were then covered up? Well, you can at least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if some other country's got a better missile? Well, there's not a whole lot for you to do sitting at home in like New York City or, you know, fucking Austin, Texas, right? Like, what are we to do about China's hyper? I don't know. My assumption, generally speaking, not that this isn't interesting, but my assumption, generally speaking, is that when you're talking about Russia, China, the United States, we can all murder each other if we wanted to, right? Like, we've all got real nice missiles at this point.

And it's this, you know, the Chinese spy balloon stuff is like interesting. I don't think anyone's surprised by this. Like we knew there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique. It's again, it's interesting that there were four other spy balloons in the area, but we simply know from older reporting that this happened like three or four times while Trump was in office too. So like, yeah, this is something we've known about. There's been reporting about. This is corroboration. That's interesting.

Again, none of this is really like a sea change in our understanding of any of these conflicts. It is interesting context. Some of it's being blown up, you know, into stuff that it isn't. There's reporting on like the number of US servicemen in Ukraine that's being like spun as like, we've got boots on the ground there.

And it's like, well, they're like embassy guards and stuff. There's like 29 dudes that this like confirmed. Michael Tracy asked. This confirms there's not a lot of US guys on the ground there. We do send a lot of people when we're doing wars. But yeah, like every embassy in the world has a contingent of Marines

who make sure that it doesn't just get. Yeah. I don't want to say Benghazi. But yeah. Yeah. And Benghazi. Yeah, that's fine. And this is not new news to anyone who's been paying attention.

But if you are Michael Tracy, this is brain melting shit. Michael Tracy is a weirdo quasi left journalist who like early on in the war, he didn't want to go into Ukraine very much, but he like hung out in Poland and took pictures of like US soldiers and like a facility that they were, had been in for years and was like, look, you know, this is evidence of the secret US support.

And it's like, guys, I mean, for one thing, like look at this, look at how much shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children. If there's like, guys, I mean, for one thing, like, look at this. Look at how much shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children. If there were like like secret massive formations of U.S. troops or even large like forces of U.S. spec ops guys carrying out operations in Ukraine, how good do you think they'd be at keeping that shit secret? Right. For one thing, like special forces guys get killed all the fucking time.

Like they get killed. they get overrun. Like it's a terrible risk for us to just like send SEAL Team 6 in to fight the Russians. When, spoilers, the Ukrainians have really good special forces guys. Every bit as good as ours, actually, with in a lot of cases, more experience fighting this kind of war. And we're giving and it's like if you want to talk about U.s involvement we're giving them their weapons like we're involved fucking plenty there's just not much of a point in us like sending the green fucking berets in to bakamut right like why um that doesn't that doesn't help us at all um that doesn't like help our our government that's not like good for the military. It would be stupid. Anyway, whatever.

Anything else to talk about here? Do we want to talk about the Israel one? Oh, yeah. No, this is one of the interests, although it's not, again, basically one of the things that leaked is like the U.S. is spying on all of its allies, which this leaks every couple of years. We're always spying on our allies, including Israel. Israel has spied on us a bunch.

That's why they have nuclear weapons. Yeah, James, you want to talk about this? Yeah, so this is a document that basically, what it alleges is that what has been alleged, perhaps incorrectly, is that it was encouraging Mossad staff to to attend protests against Netanyahu when he was attempting his uh like uh his auto golpe his like his coup from within uh whatever you want to call that right his um he was attempting to centralize power right yeah yeah yeah now uh it's it's a leaked like you say it's a document uh and it says that, I'm quoting from it, or I'm quoting from reporting on it at least,

senior leaders of the Mossad spy service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli government's proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government, according to SIGINT, signals intelligence. government according to sigint um signals intelligence the infant like so actually netanyahu himself has been asked about this um and it's worth noting that he appointed the mossad director a guy called david i think it's by mayor yeah um and he has also uh he's he's on the record previously in news media before this saying that he had clarified to Mossad personnel

who could attend protests and who could not attend. Because at a certain point in any of these things, you're not allowed to be explicitly political, right? Yeah. Folks even at a very low point in the US military, you're not supposed to say and do certain things. So there was a petition that went out earlier and again this has already been reported uh they that was sent by intelligence officers basically saying like we'll go on strike yeah and there had been again like widely reported instances of other israeli military people saying that they

would go on strike or not show up for work uh if these judicial reforms went ahead so i think again it's been uh kind of we've really stretched what was interesting i thought was that it had a fisa label on um fisa is the foreign intelligence surveillance act and if people aren't familiar um basically it allows u.s intelligence to wiretap things which they could do it without warrant if it doesn't include a u.s person uh so a u.s person is not just a citizen but also maybe a permanent resident something like that right like a person who has more rights than others in the united states uh but in this case they seem to have got a fisa warrant um which it's very easy to get right it's like a closed courtroom procedure

where they go to a judge and like it's not like an adversarial uh argument no there's no one who argues that you should get the warrant. So in practice, they nearly always get these warrants. But what it showed, they have to disprove that it's an intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed that at some point they went for a judge and said, hey, we need to wiretap some kind of communication. I of communication sort of i'm using wiretap in the broad sense rather than a specific sense but uh it's it's interesting i think that that they have um some intelligence asset in the united states who said hey we know there's an israeli

intelligence asset and and to be clear that this could just be shit that's going in and out of the embassy um and they've decided that they that they needed to wiretap that and keep an eye on that and now given given given that like israel's foreign policy has been toxic terrible for decades but netanyahu is is a new degree of crazy uh it is it's unsurprising that like anyone concerned with uh uh, I guess international relations would, would want to know more about what, what's going on. And again,

like that's, it's interesting context. As you noted, a lot of this had been reported out previously. Um, so yeah, it's, it's just like,

um, it's, it's, it's all interesting. Again, I'm my, my, my,

my attitude here is like, I'm glad this information is out and I don't really care what happens to Jack Texiera. Like, yeah, in my ideal world, the policing infrastructure that's come down on this kid would not exist. But he made this decision knowing full well what happens when you leak top secret. It's one of those things where it's like just within the context of shit that's fucked up in our country, the thing I'm going to be upset about is not a kid leaking top secret info to win an online argument and then having it blow up on him, right? Especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi. At the end of the day, he did something that was obviously done. It's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his real name and

starts posting pictures of heroin and saying, hey guys, this is my name and address. I'm selling hella heroin. Here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well, I think heroin should be legal, but I'm not going to like, I'm not going to like make a crusade out of that guy's arrest because that's stupid. Like, like, you know what happens if you post, hey, here is my home address and name. Here is all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah, you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online a serious crime. Obviously, that could be a problem for you. That's just not my primary

concern in the world when people do really stupid shit and it blows up on them. And it's like, again, leakers, you look at the way Manning proceeded, you look at the way Snowden proceeded, they were aware of the danger of what they were doing. I mean, you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison. Snowden fled the country. That's because they were actually whistleblowers. They were whistleblowers. They under, they under, they understood this is a serious,

like, this is very illegal and I have to try to take steps to protect myself. Because the government's going to come after me. The thing about Jack is like just the level of like arrogance that like I can post this shit all day long and nothing will happen. It was like, well, for one thing, this is never going like it's information you're posting online. Like, I don't care.

There's no way to keep stuff completely contained within a 30 person discord. It's going to leak out. And when it is, the government's going to want to know who the fuck is leaking this shit. And you took like took pictures of this shit inside his home. Like, it's just dumb. I'm not gonna like, I don't at the end of the day, I have no room in my sympathy for like a fucking fashy kid who committed the dumbest crime possible and got in trouble. Like, I don't know if there's there's people who, I don't know, for example, we're camping in a forest and are

getting charged with terrorism and facing longer penalties, right? Jack might do 15 years at the most, which is like fucked up, I guess. But, you know, there's people facing a lot worse for a lot less. And I just, you know, whatever. I don't care what happens to this kid. He seems like he sucks. I think the leaks are interesting. to this kid he seems like he sucks um i think the leaks are interesting there's nothing in here that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics though yeah that's where i am i

would agree it is a useful reminder to keep your crime offline yeah don't uh continue continue to not post crimes on the internet um again if you're selling heroin, don't post on Twitter, here is my name and home address. Anyone want to buy some fucking China White? That's not a great idea. If anyone has any top secret documents, you can find me on the Star Wars The Old Republic forums. Just post them there.

I am part of the Jedi Initiate Program, so just locate that, and I'm sure I'll see it. Yeah, I am on the Nosdormu server on World of Warcraft. You can just hit me up under my given name. Just DM me, and we'll figure it out. You can send that shit to me over AOL Instant Messenger. That's how I take all of my leaks. It's the most secure platform.

You can find me in the Mountain Project comment section where only good things happen. We're all on War Thunder too, so you can hit us up there too. For work reasons, yeah. I'll be shit-talking your grading on a problem, but also accepting national security leaks. Yeah, we do it all.

All right, everybody, that's an episode. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. Danny Trejo, and Step Into the Flames of Fright, an anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez

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