Biden Admin on Doc Leak: More Surveillance Needed

By Nick Koutsobinas    |   Saturday, 15 April 2023 06:17 PM EDT

The Biden administration is looking to increase social media surveillance, a senior  administration official told NBC News, after a 21-year-old military member leaked documents regarding the United States' involvement in Ukraine, which circulated on a gaming forum for weeks before breaking out into the news cycle.

"Nobody is happy about this," the senior administration official said, adding that the administration is now looking to expand its surveillance to a whole universe of online platforms.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald says in a Rumble video that the revelations in the Pentagon documents paint a different picture than what the Biden administration has told the public about U.S. involvement in Ukraine. The documents, leaked by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman and information technology specialist Jack Teixeira, indicate that the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Latvia, has sent special forces to Ukraine — a non-NATO ally, Greenwald reports. The documents also reveal that the Biden administration has assessed that there will be no peace negotiations over Ukraine in 2023.

The intelligence community is working on figuring out how to scrub platforms like Discord, the gaming platform where the documents first appeared, to prevent future leaks, one congressional official reportedly told NBC. 

Teixara was named as the prime suspect of the leaked documents after The New York Times, and as Greenwald reports, worked jointly with the "CIA-front Bellingcat" to ensure "the arrest of the 21-year-old leaker. Now [the publications are] having a party with the docs, publishing one 'EXCLUSIVE' after the next as if they bravely 'obtained' them." 

In a now since-deleted tweet by The Times' head military reporter, David Philipps, he says, "The NYT worked feverishly to find the identity of the guy leaking TS docs on Discord. Ironically, if they same guy had leaked to the NYT, we'd be working feverishly to conceal it."  

In the NBC News report, former intelligence officials said that the intelligence community is now wrestling with how to surveil platforms like Discord to prevent future leaks. They add that while monitoring public chats is fair game, monitoring private chats presents legal hurdles. 

The remarks from the intel officials come after Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., who authored the controversial "RESTRICT Act," added that the leaks raise questions as to how the government manages its secrets. 

"We've now got two examples, you know, the potential mishandling of documents by current and former presidents and now this potential leak, or real leak," Warner stated. "I think it does raise a question that in some cases we way overclassify. In other cases, we may ... give out the documents to too many people."  

"I think," he adds, "it's time that Congress plays a role here in setting some parameters."  

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/pentagon-biden-administration-ukraine/2023/04/15/id/1116295/