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What was actually shared were photos on top of a hunting magazine. You cannot take photos of secure documents inside a secure location and the hunting magazine suggests a private one though maybe national guard toilets have copies for while-you-wait scenarios. He is the one they have traced the leak to. He is a network specialist at a fairly high level but in the national guard. National Guard IT resources are probably also used by the regular military on some bases and if so as a network specialist, it is possible he intercepted the original documents onsite and found a digital way to smuggle them out of the secure location. I find that surprising because it is possible to secure top-secret documents even from high-level IT support personnel and admins with encryption to specific devices and people profiles and passwords for example. He might then have done his own printout which was stolen by someone else or this printout of more than 100 documents (so a big document) is the original source. It is not something you could smuggle out in the lining of your jacket. maybe in a briefcase. It should have been noticed unless the security on these bases works on some kind of trust system and he just violated that trust.Consider then what is being suggested here....
A national guard airman, gets access to rooms where senior officials or top analysts are just chucking intel into the trash, or leaving it out, while this guy is supposed to fix the computer....and it is the sort of intel you could sell for billions of dollars....far more valuable than anything released by Snowden or others....but time sensitive.
And he's just folding it up in his pocket, and walking out the door with it?
Again, it's either a level of incompetence that is unparalleled in Pentagon history or he isn't the leaker. He probably shared this stuff on the discord room...
It took months to find him? Why? They don't have any security cameras in the Pentagon? They can't track this guy's IP address? Nothing about this story makes sense.
That they took so long to find him argues against malicious intent and also against digital theft of data. It sounds like the leak to the public occurred via someone he shared the documents with. His motives seem more like bragging rights or keeping a group of friends informed. If the source was a printout there would be no digital audit trail to follow. They would only have known when the press found out.
Given the volume of intelligence and the sheer numbers with high levels of access, this is not so much incompetence as an accident that has been waiting to happen. As I said before most of what was revealed could have been worked out by educated guesswork without the documents. There are very few surprising revelations here. It is just that the mainstream narrative and Biden's pronouncements have been keen to magnify Ukrainian successes rather than their weaknesses in public. This is a normal war stance.
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