Sad Lonely Man

It looks like the leaker of those documents via Discord was a twentyish employee of the military trying to impress a group of (mostly male) teenagers. A good story in the Washington Post (no paywall) pretty much repeats what Aric Toler of Bellingcat wrote and then said on a podcast. He interviewed the person who provided most of the WaPo’s story a few days before their reporters got to him. The people involved are identifiable enough that there should be FBI arrests in the next few days.

Those of us who are far too online recognized many of the signs, most prominently the route of disclosure. One of my questions is exactly what position this sad lonely man in his twenties held that gave him access to this material. My guess is that he had little, if any, need to know in my rather strict thinking about such things.

When the thinking among the investigators comes out, as it likely will, we will learn how aware the investigators were of the sad lonely men who populate Discord and much of the internet. Probably not very. The unwillingness of the governmental intelligence community to deal with unclassified evidence is becoming more than an inconvenience. The contrast was clear last night in a couple of tweets.

You might think that the public drama playing out of a sad lonely man buying one of the internet’s baubles to make people like him would have made an impression, but probably not.