ChatGPT Got Its Wolfram Superpowers

stephenwolfram  |  Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as “computational superpowers”. It’s still very early days for all of this, but it’s already very impressive—and one can begin to see how amazingly powerful (and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call “ChatGPT + Wolfram” can be.

Back in January, I made the point that, as an LLM neural net, ChatGPT—for all its remarkable prowess in textually generating material “like” what it’s read from the web, etc.—can’t itself be expected to do actual nontrivial computations, or to systematically produce correct (rather than just “looks roughly right”) data, etc. But when it’s connected to the Wolfram plugin it can do these things. So here’s my (very simple) first example from January, but now done by ChatGPT with “Wolfram superpowers” installed:

It’s a correct result (which in January it wasn’t)—found by actual computation. And here’s a bonus: immediate visualization:

How did this work? Under the hood, ChatGPT is formulating a query for Wolfram|Alpha—then sending it to Wolfram|Alpha for computation, and then “deciding what to say” based on reading the results it got back. You can see this back and forth by clicking the “Used Wolfram” box (and by looking at this you can check that ChatGPT didn’t “make anything up”):

There are lots of nontrivial things going on here, on both the ChatGPT and Wolfram|Alpha sides. But the upshot is a good, correct result, knitted into a nice, flowing piece of text.

Let’s try another example, also from what I wrote in January:

A fine result, worthy of our technology. And again, we can get a bonus:

In January, I noted that ChatGPT ended up just “making up” plausible (but wrong) data when given this prompt:

But now it calls the Wolfram plugin and gets a good, authoritative answer. And, as a bonus, we can also make a visualization:

Another example from back in January that now comes out correctly is:

If you actually try these examples, don’t be surprised if they work differently (sometimes better, sometimes worse) from what I’m showing here. Since ChatGPT uses randomness in generating its responses, different things can happen even when you ask it the exact same question (even in a fresh session). It feels “very human”. But different from the solid “right-answer-and-it-doesn’t-change-if-you-ask-it-again” experience that one gets in Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language.

Here’s an example where we saw ChatGPT (rather impressively) “having a conversation” with the Wolfram plugin, after at first finding out that it got the “wrong Mercury”:

One particularly significant thing here is that ChatGPT isn’t just using us to do a “dead-end” operation like show the content of a webpage. Rather, we’re acting much more like a true “brain implant” for ChatGPT—where it asks us things whenever it needs to, and we give responses that it can weave back into whatever it’s doing. It’s rather impressive to see in action. And—although there’s definitely much more polishing to be done—what’s already there goes a long way towards (among other things) giving ChatGPT the ability to deliver accurate, curated knowledge and data—as well as correct, nontrivial computations.

But there’s more too. We already saw examples where we were able to provide custom-created visualizations to ChatGPT. And with our computation capabilities we’re routinely able to make “truly original” content—computations that have simply never been done before. And there’s something else: while “pure ChatGPT” is restricted to things it “learned during its training”, by calling us it can get up-to-the-moment data.

 

ChatGPT-4 And The Future Of AI

wired  |  The stunning capabilities of ChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment in artificial intelligence. But late last week, OpenAI’s CEO warned that the research strategy that birthed the bot is played out. It's unclear exactly where future advances will come from.

OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100 million.

But the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We'll make them better in other ways.”

Altman’s declaration suggests an unexpected twist in the race to develop and deploy new AI algorithms. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft has used the underlying technology to add a chatbot to its Bing search engine, and Google has launched a rival chatbot called Bard. Many people have rushed to experiment with using the new breed of chatbot to help with work or personal tasks.

Meanwhile, numerous well-funded startups, including Anthropic, AI21, Cohere, and Character.AI, are throwing enormous resources into building ever larger algorithms in an effort to catch up with OpenAI’s technology. The initial version of ChatGPT was based on a slightly upgraded version of GPT-3, but users can now also access a version powered by the more capable GPT-4.

Altman’s statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge from OpenAI’s strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4, OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centers the company can build and how quickly it can build them.

Nick Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere who previously worked on AI at Google, says Altman’s feeling that going bigger will not work indefinitely rings true. He, too, believes that progress on transformers, the type of machine learning model at the heart of GPT-4 and its rivals, lies beyond scaling. “There are lots of ways of making transformers way, way better and more useful, and lots of them don’t involve adding parameters to the model,” he says. Frosst says that new AI model designs, or architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising directions that many researchers are already exploring.

Musk Full Interview: An "Unfair Presentation Of Reality"

WaPo  | There are laws that govern how federal law enforcement can seek information from companies such as Twitter, including a mechanism for Twitter’s costs to be reimbursed. Twitter had traditionally provided public information on such requests (in the aggregate, not specifically) but hasn’t updated those metrics since Musk took over.

But notice that this is not how Carlson and Musk frame the conversation.

Once Musk gained control of Twitter, he began providing sympathetic writers with internal documents so they could craft narratives exposing the ways in which pre-Musk Twitter was complicit with the government and the left in nefarious ways. These were the “Twitter Files,” various presentations made on Twitter itself using cherry-picked and often misrepresented information.

One such presentation made an accusation similar to what Carlson was getting at: that the government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor user information. That was how Musk presented that particular “Twitter File,” the seventh in the series, though this wasn’t true. The right-wing author of the thread focused on government interactions with social media companies in 2020 aimed at uprooting 2016-style misinformation efforts. His thread suggested through an aggregation of carefully presented documents that the government aimed to censor political speech. The author also pointedly noted that Twitter had received more than $3 million in federal funding, hinting that it was pay-to-play for censorship.

The insinuations were quickly debunked. The funding was, in reality, reimbursement to Twitter for compliance with the government’s subpoenaed data requests, as allowed under the law. The government’s effort — as part of the Trump administration, remember — did not obviously extend beyond curtailing foreign interference and other illegalities. But the narrative, boosted by Musk, took hold. And then was presented back to Musk by Carlson.

Notice that Musk doesn’t say that government actors were granted full, unlimited access to Twitter communications in the way that Carlson hints. His responses to Carlson comport fully with a scenario in which the government subpoenas Twitter for information and gets access to it in compliance with federal law. Or perhaps doesn’t! In Twitter’s most recent data on government requests, 3 in 10 were denied.

Maybe Musk didn’t understand that relationship between law enforcement and Twitter before buying the company, as he appears not to have understood other aspects of the company. Perhaps he was one of those rich people who assumed that because DMs were private they were secure — something he, a tech guy, should not have assumed, but who knows.

It’s certainly possible that there was illicit access from some government entity to Twitter’s data stores, perhaps in an ongoing fashion. But Carlson is suggesting (and Musk isn’t rejecting) an apparent symbiosis, in keeping with the misrepresented Twitter Files #7.

It is useful for Musk to have people think that he is creating a new Twitter that’s centered on free speech and protection of individual communications. That was his value proposition in buying it, after all. And it is apparently endlessly useful to Carlson to present a scenario to his viewers in which he and they are the last bastions of American patriotism, fending off government intrusions large and small and the robot-assisted machinations of the political left.

In each case, something is being sold to the audience. In Musk’s case, it’s a safe, bold, right-wing-empathetic Twitter. In Carlson’s, it’s the revelation of a dystopic America that must be tracked through vigilant observation each weekday at 8 p.m.

In neither case is the hype obviously a fair presentation of reality.

Google Says: Wretched Humans "Ready Or Not Here AI Comes"

CNBC  |  Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said “every product of every company” will be impacted by the quick development of AI, warning that society needs to prepare for technologies like the ones it’s already launched.

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Sunday that struck a concerned tone, interviewer Scott Pelley tried several of Google’s artificial intelligence projects and said he was “speechless” and felt it was “unsettling,” referring to the human-like capabilities of products like Google’s chatbot Bard.

“We need to adapt as a society for it,” Pichai told Pelley, adding that jobs that would be disrupted by AI would include “knowledge workers,” including writers, accountants, architects and, ironically, even software engineers.

“This is going to impact every product across every company,” Pichai said. “For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you. You come in the morning, let’s say you have a hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious cases you need to look at first.’”

Pelley viewed other areas with advanced AI products within Google, including DeepMind, where robots were playing soccer, which they learned themselves, as opposed to from humans. Another unit showed robots that recognized items on a countertop and fetched Pelley an apple he asked for.

When warning of AI’s consequences, Pichai said that the scale of the problem of disinformation and fake news and images will be “much bigger,” adding that “it could cause harm.”

Last month, CNBC reported that internally, Pichai told employees that the success of its newly launched Bard program now hinges on public testing, adding that “things will go wrong.”

Google launched its AI chatbot Bard as an experimental product to the public last month. It followed Microsoft

’s January announcement that its search engine Bing would include OpenAI’s GPT technology, which garnered international attention after ChatGPT launched in 2022.

However, fears of the consequences of the rapid progress has also reached the public and critics in recent weeks. In March, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and dozens of academics called for an immediate pause in training “experiments” connected to large language models that were “more powerful than GPT-4,” OpenAI’s flagship LLM. More than 25,000 people have signed the letter since then.

“Competitive pressure among giants like Google and startups you’ve never heard of is propelling humanity into the future, ready or not,” Pelley commented in the segment.

Google has launched a document outlining “recommendations for regulating AI,” but Pichai said society must quickly adapt with regulation, laws to punish abuse and treaties among nations to make AI safe for the world as well as rules that “Align with human values including morality.”

 

America Just Needs To Get Her Story Straight And Compel The World To Swallow It!!!

WaPo  |  In the long contest ahead with Russia and China, U.S. military power will be of greatest importance, but non-military instruments of power will be essential to our ability to compete and win as well. The most crucial such instrument is economic, the importance of which is widely recognized, as both the executive branch and Congress work to promote strong growth and technological superiority.

We have, however, seriously neglected other instruments of power that were fundamental to winning the Cold War: telling our story to the world, telling the truth to populations of countries ruled by authoritarian governments and exposing disinformation spread by those same governments.

Strategic communications and engagement with foreign publics and leaders are essential to shaping the global political environment in ways that support and advance American national interests. In this crucial arena of the competition, however, Russia and China are running rings around us.

Russia’s militarized bid to reverse the Cold War verdict and resurrect its empire has relied heavily on propaganda and disinformation to spread false narratives among its own people and those outside its borders, as well as to undermine the West’s coherence and resolve. Because Russia has no positive narrative to offer, its strategic communications aimed at other countries mainly attack the United States and the West, and serve as spoilers intended to disrupt and divide. 

China has taken a far more comprehensive approach. It has built an extraordinary global strategic communications and foreign influence operation, committing huge sums of money to building a modern media apparatus aimed at domestic and world audiences. China’s Xinhua News Agency has nearly 180 bureaus globally (and there is not a single country on the planet that is not reached by one or more Chinese radio, television or online outlets). Chinese companies buy stakes in domestic media outlets in numerous countries, especially in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. Chinese TV and radio broadcasts, websites and publications are readily available in the United States, but there is no reciprocity in China. More than 500 Confucius Institutes, ostensibly established to promote Chinese language and culture, spread China’s message around the world. The scale of the overall endeavor — and multiple mechanisms used — is without parallel.

In stark contrast, the United States after the Cold War largely dismantled its strategic communications and engagement capabilities. The U.S. Information Agency, our primary instrument to engage foreign publics throughout the Cold War, with a presence in 150 countries, was eliminated in 1999. Parts of it were parceled out to the State Department, and most of our know-how and key structures for engaging foreign publics were left to atrophy. The lack of priority attention to American strategic communications and engagement over the years is demonstrated most vividly by the fact that the undersecretary position in the State Department charged with overseeing these efforts has not had a Senate-confirmed occupant 40 percent of the time since it was created in 1999 and 90 percent of the time under Donald Trump and President Biden.

U.S. strategic communications and public diplomacy are fragmented among 14 agencies and 48 commissions. Yet, the State Department, which ought to be driving this train, lacks not just necessary resources in dollars and people but also, importantly, the authority to coordinate, integrate and synchronize these disparate and unfocused efforts. Further, there is no government-wide international communications and engagement strategy, and certainly no sense of urgency. In short, the country that invented public relations is being out-communicated around the world by an authoritarian Russia and increasingly totalitarian China.

Our approach must be different from theirs. Our advantage over the Soviet Union in strategic communications during the Cold War was that the USIA and our radio broadcasters such as Voice of America simply told the truth. We must continue to do so. However, in those days we had eager audiences in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. The global audience today is more skeptical, so we must develop new approaches to effectively deliver our message.

The solution is not to re-create the USIA — the world has moved on. But a number of measures can be taken to dramatically improve the current lamentable state of affairs, some strategic, others operational. Many of them the president could implement immediately, while others would require congressional action.

When MTG And The World Socialist Web Site Are Allies - The Plot Has TRULY Thickened

WSWS  |  The response of the US media to a series of leaked Pentagon documents revealing US involvement in the Ukraine war raises far-reaching issues of democratic rights.

On Thursday, the New York Times publicly identified the individual who allegedly leaked Pentagon documents exposing US government lies about the Ukraine war, leading to his arrest.

The Times, working with the state-funded propaganda clearinghouse Bellingcat, publicly revealed the identity of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guard member. Teixeira was arrested just hours later.

There are indications that Teixeira holds repulsive fascist and antisemitic views. But Teixeira’s motivations do not change the fact that the documents he released caught the US government red-handed in systematically lying to the public in waging an undeclared war against Russia in Ukraine.

The documents showed that, contrary to false claims by the Biden administration, NATO troops are on the ground in Ukraine, NATO is directly involved in the war, and the Ukrainian military is in a far worse position than presented by news reports.

These documents have exposed not only the US government, but the New York Times and Washington Post, as liars.

In turn, the major US media outlets have responded by upholding, in principle, the right of the US government to lie to the public.

On Thursday, the Washington Post published an editorial headlined, “The Discord leaks show our nation’s secrets at risk.”

Nowhere in the editorial is there any criticism of the Biden administration for having lied to the American public. Instead, the editorial upholds government secrecy, and vows to assist the government to keep the public from knowing what the government wishes to keep secret.

The editorial declares, “Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government.”  

In making this statement, the Post, owned by the oligarch Jeff Bezos, has declared war on a fundamental precept of democratic rule.

Airing Tonight At 8:00pm EST - Elon Talks With Tucker About The Censorship Industrial Complex

RT  |  The social network’s boss says the US government had “full access” to everything © AP / Susan Walsh

The billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed that he was shocked to find out the real scale of the US government involvement and access to Twitter communications when he purchased and took full control of the social media giant last year.

“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, claiming he “was not aware of that” up until he eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October. Musk confirmed that “everything” includes users’ supposedly private direct messages, but the brief Sunday teaser of the upcoming interview did not show whether Musk went on to call out any particular agencies or their methods. It is also unclear what, if anything, has since changed to limit the scope of the government’s access to people’s private communications.

Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the platform’s new CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously opaque censorship policies and cozy ties with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, enlisting independent journalists to break each document dump.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on the first batch of files back in December, recently described the collusion between social media platforms, non-governmental organizations and the US government to suppress information they did not like as the “censorship-industrial complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a free press envisioned in the US Constitution.

Teixeira Just An Immature IT CHUD - MTG Is The Actual Face Of Resistance

theguardian  |  Washington lawmakers have written off Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal” after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning praise from the political right.

“He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.

Federal prosecutors allege Teixeira took secret documents from the Massachusetts air national guard base where he worked as a low-ranking cyber specialist and posted them online. They first appeared on one of the gaming messaging platform Discord’s servers in January before spreading to other social media sites and being reported on by news outlets earlier this month.

Shortly after he was taken into custody in Massachusetts on Thursday, the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has persistently called for the Joe Biden White House and Washington in general to cut off support to Kyiv – rallied to his defense.

“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” she tweeted in an apparent reference to one of the leaked documents that indicates 14 US special forces soldiers were present in Ukraine during the past two months.

“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen [sic]? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

Other documents have revealed details of how the United States gathers its information and how deeply its intelligence agencies have penetrated Russia’s military. Also among the leaked material is a pessimistic assessment of Ukraine’s prospects of recapturing territory from Russia this spring – a subject Carlson seized on.

“Ukraine is in fact losing the war,” he said, citing other documents that indicate Washington’s concerns about Kyiv’s ability to defend its airspace.

“The Biden administration is perfectly aware of this. They’re panicked about it, but they have lied about this fact to the public. Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is ‘waning’. In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime.”

It Aint As Gucci As People Think...,

NYTimes  |  In the Air Force, Airman Teixeira became a low-level computer tech at Otis Air National Guard Base in Sandwich, Mass., where his mother said he worked nights, helping maintain secure networks. There, he had broad access to a secure facility where he could access a global network of classified material from the military and 17 other American intelligence agencies.

Authorities say that Mr. Teixeira eventually leaked dozens of documents containing potentially harmful details about the war in Ukraine and other sensitive national security topics. 

That a 21-year-old with so little authority could have access to a such a vast trove of top secret information might surprise the general public, but people who have worked in the intelligence world say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.

Those workers can log onto the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — essentially a highly classified version of Google — and in milliseconds pull up briefings on Ukraine, China or nearly any other sensitive subject that the U.S. government collects intelligence on.

Though his motivations may be different, Mr. Teixeira is remarkably similar to two other high-profile leakers in recent years, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, said Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who held intelligence roles at the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 of giving more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. Ms. Winner was a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist working as a military contractor who in 2017 printed out a classified report on Russian hacking, hid it in her pantyhose, and gave it to The Intercept.

Unlike Ms. Manning and Ms. Winner, who came to be seen as whistle-blowers motivated by ideology, Airman Teixeira did not appear to be driven by government policies, according to people who knew him online.

But all three were relatively young and had security clearances that were the classified intelligence equivalent of having the keys to dad’s red convertible.

“Clearly their relatively young age is a common factor, and I would hope the intelligence community is thinking about that,” said Bennett Miller, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst. “The problem is that the community needs these people. It can’t work without them.”

The words “top secret” may conjure images of pristine vaults and retinal scanners, Mr. Miller said, but in reality, while some highly classified material is siloed in special access programs, most of the rest is accessible to thousands of ordinary people who have security clearances. And security can be surprisingly lax.

Often, these systems are basically just a bunch of computers on a desk and there is “nothing really stopping anyone from printing something and carrying it out,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “It ain’t as Gucci as people think.”

When We Leak It's News, When You Leak It's Treason!!!

racket  |  On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

The Establishment Playbook For Maligning Leakers And Ignoring What's Leaked...,

greenwald  |  On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump's incomcing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State launedered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclsoure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking esclation -- it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest. 

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves. Thus:

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – showing the US Government was lying to the American public that it believed it could win the war in Vietnam – FBI and CIA agents broke into the office of his psychoanalyst to try to expose his psychosexual secrets to discredit him and distract from the substance of the disclosures.

When Chelsea Manning leaked massive evidence of hidden US war crimes to WikiLeaks, long-time anti-LGBT bigot Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC and others said the overarching motive was mental illness over gender identity.

When it became clear that Julian Assange had created a powerful and formidible instrument for holding the U.S. Security State accountable and exposing their lies and crimes -- WikiLeaks -- corporate outlets began puking up a deluge of personal attacks against him, ones designed to make people conclude he is so repellent that the disclosures he enabled should be ignored because he was just too personally distasteful. The then-editor-in-chief of The New York Times Bill Keller even stooped to demeaning his personal hygiene, publishing this 2011 paragraph that he said he received from one of his reporters:

“He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

When Edward Snowden furnished to myself and Laura Poitras the previously secret evidence that Obama national security official James Clapper lied to the public when denying that the NSA spied en masse on millions of Americans --  reporting that ended up winning every major journalism prize in the West and that caused an appellate court to rule that Obama's NSA had acted both unconstituitonally and illegally in infringing the privacy rights of millions of Americans -- CNN, NYT. NBC and The New Yorkier's Jeffrey Toobin labeled him a "narcissist" for believing he knew better than everyone else, and numerous outlets dug through his old blog comments to prove he had bad politics as a teenager.

Now, when doing the FBI's work by outing Jack Teixeira, both the Washington Post and CNN are emphasizing transgressive comments he made about race and anti-Semitism in a teenagers' gaming room to distract attention from the lies these docs reveal about, among other things, Biden's role in Ukraine.

Teixeira Has A Face Made For A Bud Lite Can....,

NYPost  |  Accused Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira could not have acted alone — suggesting the 21-year-old is merely the patsy in a much wider intelligence breach, according to one of former-President Trump’s top national security aides.

Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar.

That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.

And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.

Ask yourself who is the real enemy?

A young low level national guardsmen?

Or the…

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 13, 2023

“It’s just not possible” for a low-level Air National Guard information technology specialist like Teixeira to have access to the trove of highly sensitive US intelligence he allegedly revealed, according to Kash Patel, Trump’s former deputy director of national intelligence.

“You can be the biggest IT person in [the Department of Defense], and you are still compartmented off of the actual information,” Patel told Breitbart News Saturday.

“Almost never does an IT person need to know, as we say, the substance of the intelligence,” Patel, a onetime Pentagon chief of staff, told the conservative outlet. “Their job is to provide the secure information systems around it to protect any disclosures.”

“This is crazy sensitive stuff,” he said of the detailed data about Ukraine’s military planning that Teixeira is accused of posting online. “Ninety-nine percent of people who have a Top Secret/SCI clearance don’t have access to this information.”

Patel said he does not believe “for a single second” that “this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran his operation alone.”

Instead, he said, the explosive revelations are likely part of “an Assange-style operation” — referring to the WikiLeaks founder who faces espionage charges for helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files.

“The way it was produced, the way it was put out there — pages, printed photographs taken, published online — that is a methodical way of releasing classified information illegally,” Patel said.

“I think he’s definitely working with other people in DOD or the intel space to get this information out,” he added — calling Teixiera’s Thursday arrest “an extensive cover-up.”

 

Brandon's About The Only Thing More Expendable Than Airman Incel-Nerd-Patsy

sonar21  |  Until I saw the document labeled, CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update, I was inclined to believe that the leaked documents were the work of a frustrated whistleblower. But I have changed my mind. This looks like a controlled, directed leak by individuals who manipulated the 21 year old National Guard troop into taking certain documents and posting them on a public server.

The CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update is a document produced by analysts in the Operations Center to be delivered to the regular CIA analysts. When I worked in the Ops Center I was responsible for monitoring traffic from Latin American posts and flagging items that the analysts in the Latin American Division need to know. I would write up summary paragraphs just like the ones in the documents leaked on line. This was an internal CIA document. It was not broadcast to the other intelligence agencies. In my 23 years working with U.S. military commands around the world, I never saw a copy of this type of report circulating among those with the highest clearances. Never. How did a 21 year old kid get his hands on at least two of these?

The classified documents now in the public domain are focused primarily on Russia and Ukraine. The CIA Ops Center docs now floating around the internet are only partial copies. For example, there are three pages, all classified Top Secret, from an eight page document. If you’re a goofy 21 year old gamer simply intent on impressing your young proteges, why not take all eight pages. My guess is that the other five pages contained no intelligence information on Ukraine or Russia.

The kid reportedly was a cyber analyst assigned to the 102 Intelligence Wing, which reports to the U.S. 16 Air Force:

The 102nd ISS provides intelligence systems maintenance, integration, and operations for the AN/GSQ-272 SENTINEL weapon system, as part of the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (AF-DCGS) Enterprise, enabling near real-time Collection, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (CPED) of

The Sixteenth Air Force (Air Forces Cyber), headquartered at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, focuses on information warfare in the modern age.  Information Warfare requires integrating: Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance; Cyber Warfare; Electromagnetic Warfare; Weather; Public Affairs; and Information Operations capabilities. 16th Air Force ensures that our Air Force and Nation are fast, resilient, and fully integrated in competition, crisis, and conflict by incorporating Information Warfare at operational and tactical levels, capitalizing on the value of information by leading the charge for uniquely-21st century challenges in the highly dynamic, seamless, and global information domain..

I do not believe it is a coincidence that he served in an information warfare unit. Remember, he was a low ranked enlisted guy. He had a chain of command. He did not show up to work and decide what duties he had to perform while on the job. He reported to and worked at the direction of Non-Commissioned Officers and Commissioned Officers. He did not just waltz into a SCIF and print documents at his leisure. A guy at his level would attract attention if he was printing off a document like the CIA Ops Center report.

I believe that the alleged leaker did have access to Top Secret intelligence by virtue of his job. I don’t know if there was a polygraph requirement for him and his cohorts. Regardless, all of the intelligence that has been leaked was on a Top Secret computer net and could only be accessed inside a SCIF.

Let me explain why I think the story currently being sold to the public about this young man is too good to be true and, in my view, is a smoke screen.

The first problem is BELLINGCAT. Bellingcat is an Open Source Intelligence outfit that has been funded by U.S. and British intelligence. BELLINGCAT is “credited” with sleuthing out the identity of the site where the classified documents were posted and the name of the leaker.

Former Whitehouse Stenographer Blowing The Whistle On Biden And Jake Sullivan

NYPost  |  Then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine on a mission to bolster the country’s energy industry days after his son Hunter joined the board of natural gas company Burisma in 2014 — which a former White House stenographer claims implicates the now-80-year-old in a foreign influence-peddling “kickback scheme.”

Mike McCormick says he was with current national security adviser Jake Sullivan — then a Biden aide — in the press cabin of Air Force Two en route to Kyiv on April 21, 2014, as he outlined how the world’s wealthiest country would help the deeply corrupt post-Soviet state build its gas industry.

Giving a rundown of priorities for the trip, Sullivan — described in a transcript as an anonymous “senior administration official” — said Biden would “discuss with [Ukrainian officials] medium- and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, and also to begin to take advantage of the unconventional gas reserves that are in Ukraine.”

Asked for details, the Biden aide said the US was interested in providing “technical assistance to help [Ukraine] be able to boost production in their conventional gas fields, where presently they aren’t getting the maximum of what they could be” while offering “technical assistance relating to a regulatory framework, and also the technology that would be required to extract unconventional gas resources; and Ukraine has meaningful reserves of unconventional gas according to the latest estimates.”

In December of that year, amid broader Obama administration support for Ukraine, Congress approved $50 million to support the country’s energy sector, including the natural gas industry.

McCormick, who worked more than a decade at the White House, told The Post this week he believes the timeline of events, featuring the unmasked longtime Joe Biden aide, demonstrates that the president used his prior position to help his son’s foreign business interests.

“Joe Biden was over there telling them, ‘You can’t be corrupt! You can’t be corrupt!’ while he was corrupt,” McCormick says. “Look, this is Air Force Two. This is Joe Biden’s plane. He’s in control of it. Jake Sullivan was in the front of the plane with Joe Biden in a meeting and then he walks back in the plane to talk to the press.”

Now, McCormick tells The Post that he wants to testify before the federal grand jury in Delaware considering charges against Hunter — saying he has relevant information that the FBI ignored.

“They’ve been looking at Hunter Biden, but this ties Joe Biden and [Sullivan] into promoting a kickback scheme with Ukraine,” he said. “It’s the timeline that does it.”

Hunter’s role at Burisma was not made public until a May 12, 2014, press release from the company.

 

Beltway Dissidents Are Using The Leak As An Off-Ramp To De-Escalate WW-III

seymourhersh  |  The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.

What also is unknown is that Zalensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”

“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.

Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an American expert on international trade told me.

The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.”

Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.

Zelensky’s half-hearted response and the White House’s lack of concern was seen, the intelligence official added, as another sign of a lack of leadership that is leading to a “total breakdown” of trust between the White House and some elements of the intelligence community. Another divisive issue, I have been repeatedly told in my recent reporting, is the strident ideology and lack of political skill shown by Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. The president and his two main foreign policy advisers “live in different worlds” than the experienced diplomats and military and intelligence officers assigned to the White House;. “They have no experience, judgment, and moral integrity. They just tell lies, make up stories. Diplomatic deniability is something else,” the intelligence official said. “That has to be done.”

A prominent retired American diplomat who strenuously opposes Biden’s foreign policy toward China and Russia depicted Blinken as little more than a “jumped-up congressional staffer” and Sullivan as “a political campaign manager” who suddenly find themselves front and center in the world of high-powered diplomacy “with no empathy for the opposition. They’re decent pols,” he added, “but now we have the political and energy world all upside down. China and India are now selling refined gasoline to the Western world. It’s just business.”

The current crisis is not helped by the fact that Putin also is acting irrationally. The intelligence official told me that everything Putin has been “doing in Ukraine is counter to Russia’s long-term interests. Emotion has overcome rationality and he’s doing things that are totally nonproductive. And so are we going to sit down with Zelensky and Putin and work it out? Not a chance.”

“There is a total breakdown between the White House leadership and the intelligence community,” the intelligence official said. The rift dates back to the fall, when, as I reported in early February, Biden ordered the covertdestruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. “Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines was never discussed, or even known in advance, by the community,” the official told me. “And there is no strategy for ending the war. The US spent two years planning for the Normandy invasion in World War II. What are we going to do if China decides to invade Taiwan?” The official added that the National Intelligence Council has yet to order a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on defending Taiwan from China, which would provide national security and political guidance in case such does happen. There is no reason yet, despite repeated American political provocation from both Democrats and Republicans, the official said, to suspect that China has any intention of invading Taiwan. It has lost billions building its wildly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative aimed at linking East Asia to Europe and investing, perhaps foolishly, in seaports around the world. “The point is,” the official told me, “there is no working NIE process anymore.

“Burns is not the problem,” the official said. “The problem is Biden and his principal lieutenants—Blinken and Sullivan and their court of worshippers—who see those who criticize Zelensky as being pro-Putin. ‘We are against evil. Ukraine will fight ’til the last military shell is gone, and still fight.’ And here’s Biden who is telling America that we’re going to fight as long as it takes.”

The official cited the little-known and rarely discussed deployment, authorized by Biden, of two brigades with thousands of America’s best army combat units to the region. A brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division has been intensively training and exercising from its base inside Poland within a few miles of the Ukrainian border. It was reinforced late last year by a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division that was deployed in Romania. The actual manpower of the two brigades, when administrative and support units—with the trucks and drivers who haul the constant stream of arms and military equipment flowing by sea to keep the units combat ready—could total more than 20,000.

The intelligence officials told me that “there is no evidence that any senior official in the White House really knows what’s going on in the 82nd and 101st. Are they there as part of a NATO exercise or to serve with NATO combat units if the West decides to engage Russians units inside Ukraine? Are they there to train or to be a trigger? The rules of engagement say they can’t attack Russians unless our boys are getting attacked.”

“But the juniors are running the show here,” the official added. “There’s no NSC coordination and the US army is getting ready to go to war. There’s no idea whether the White House knows what’s going on. Has the president gone to the American people with an informative broadcast about what is going on? The only briefings the press and the public get today are from White House spokespeople.

“This is not just bad leadership. There is none. Zero.” The official added that a team of Ukrainian combat pilots are now getting trained here in America to fly US-built F-16 fighter jets, with the goal, if needed, of flying in combat against Russian troops and other targets inside Ukraine.” No decision about such deployment has been made.

The clearest statements of American policy have come not from the White House, but from the Pentagon. Army General Mark A. Milley, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the war last March 15: “Russia remains isolated. Their military stocks are rapidly depleting. Their soldiers are demoralized, untrained, unmotivated conscripts and convicts, and their leadership is failing them. Having already failed in their strategic objectives, Russia is increasingly relying on other countries, such as Iran and North Korea. . . . This relationship is built on the cruel bonds of repressing freedom, subverting liberty and maintaining their tyranny. . . . Ukraine remains strong. They are capable and trained. Ukrainian soldiers are . . . strong in their combat units. Their tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored vehicles are only going to bolster the front line.”

There is evidence that Milley is as optimistic as he sounds. I was told that two months ago the Joint Chiefs had ordered members of the staff—the military phrase is “tasked”—to draft an end-of-war treaty to present to the Russians after their defeat on the Ukraine battlefield.

If worse comes to worst for the undermanned and outgunned Ukraine army in the next few months, will the two American brigades join forces with NATO troops and face off with the Russian army inside Ukraine? Is this the plan, or hope, of the American president? Is this the fireside chat he wants to give? If Biden decides to share his thoughts with the American people, he might want to explain what two army brigades, fully staffed and supplied, are doing so close to the war zone.

Pentagon Leaks 5 Key Revelations

sputnikglobe  |  The appearance online of what looks like secret documents concerning US intelligence assessments of the conflict in Ukraine and their proliferation by media have sparked widespread controversy, with observers divided into two broad camps: those who believe the docs are genuine, and those who have reservations. Here’s what we know right now.

The leak of over 100 photographed pages of documents dated between late February and early March and labeled “Secret,” “Top Secret,” and “NOFORN” (not for viewing by foreign nationals) related to the ongoing NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine continues to generate global headlines. It has also had a real world impact, with Washington officials scrambling to contact and reassure allies amid embarrassing revelations that the US has been spying on its own allies (although, of course, that’s nothing new to anyone who’s been paying attention).

Key Takeaways
As the dust settles and the potential security implications of the leaks (including, potentially, the judiciousness of further US and NATO military assistance to Kiev), several facts seem to stand out among the info gleaned.

1. A page from a “Top Secret” assessment from February highlights apparent major “force generation and sustainment shortfalls” within Ukraine’s Armed Forces, and warns that Kiev would be able to secure only “modest territorial gains” if it decided to launch a spring offensive.

The assessment is significant because it highlights the contrast between the glum internal appraisal by the Pentagon, and the gung ho, everything-is-awesome sentiment expressed by officials in Washington and Brussels, and by President Joe Biden’s brash talk of Kiev’s impressive capabilities to conduct large-scale offensive operations with US support.

The information also raises questions about just where the tens of billions of dollars in US and NATO security assistance to Kiev has gone, given growing concerns about Western weapons sent to Ukraine somehow popping up in the hands of European gangs and African and Middle Eastern rebels and terrorist groups, while the dollar value of arms deliveries to Ukraine comes close to matching Russia’s entire annual defense budget.2. Another significant document, also dating from February, highlights President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recommendation that Ukrainian forces carry out massed drone strikes against “Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast,” and complaints that Kiev does not have the necessary long-range missile capabilities for such strikes.This piece of info is significant because it highlights President Zelensky’s apparent desperation and readiness to attack Russia directly despite warnings by some of his NATO paymasters that doing so might undermine their support for Kiev.3. The leaks challenge longstanding claims by the Pentagon and the Ukrainian military about casualties. A document entitled “Top Secret – Status of the Conflict as of March 01, 2023” estimates total Russian losses could be up to 16,000-17,500 killed in action, and 61,000-71,500 on the Ukrainian side.

That’s a far cry from the assessment by Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley in November, which estimated Russian deaths at “well over” 100,000 troops, as well as the Ukrainian military’s pie in the sky “eliminated personnel” figures of 180,050 (i.e. nearly matching the 190,000 troop total that Western intelligence estimated were near Donbass in February 2022 before the escalation of the crisis). 

Ukrainian officials and Western media have sought to downplay these figures, accusing Russia of “doctoring” the stats (despite possible secondary corroboration) and assuring that Russian casualties are much higher, and Ukrainian ones much lower. Wherever the truth lies, the figures serve to undermine confidence in Ukraine’s NATO-supported and equipped army of super soldiers.

4. Another key revelation relates to the extent of NATO involvement. While alliance officials have consistently assured that no Western forces are on the ground fighting against Russia, a “Top Secret” document dated March 23 indicates that nearly half-a-dozen NATO powers do in fact have “boots on the ground” in the form of special forces troops. These include Britain (50 troops), Latvia (17), France (15), the US (14), and the Netherlands (1).

It’s unclear what exactly these forces are doing there. The document doesn’t say. Apparently realizing the grave implications of this information, Britain’s Defense Ministry offered a catch-all dismissal of the documents, assuring in a Tweet Tuesday that “the widely reported leak of alleged classified US information has demonstrated a serious level of inaccuracy,” and that “readers should be cautious about taking at face value allegations that have the potential to spread disinformation.”

What’s significant about the NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine? Well, for one thing, they serve to confirm longstanding allegations made by senior Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the US and its allies are waging a “total war” against Russia. Moreover, it raises important questions about the dangerous potential future of proxy wars. How, for example, would the US react if Russia or China deployed special forces troops to fight NATO forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or Yugoslavia? The presence of Western alliance forces in Ukraine has effectively opened that can of worms.5. One final significant piece of information that can be gleaned from the documents relates to the state of Ukraine’s air defenses. A Pentagon assessment dated February 28 projected that Kiev’s stocks of Soviet-made Buk and S-300 missile systems – which make up almost 90 percent of the country’s air defenses, would be “fully depleted” by mid-April and May 3, respectively. A second slide from an assessment from February 23 predicts that Ukrainian forces’ frontline protection would be “completely reduced” by May 23.

This information is significant because it seems to confirm that the US and its allies are running out of time to shore up their client’s air defense protection before Russia gains total air superiority similar to the kind its Air Force enjoyed in the counterterrorism operation in Syria, or the kind the US and its allies typically have when they decide to bomb a third world country.

The US has promised to provide Ukraine with its bulky Patriot missile system and to ramp up deliveries of other anti-air weaponry, but observers have expressed concerns about the ability of the US military-industrial complex to ramp up production quickly enough, and questioned whether Washington will be willing to send additional sophisticated air defense hardware to a conflict zone where losses would mean a significant hit to US weapons makers if the equipment is lost.

Skepticism is Healthy
The leak of the documents online, and the fact that they were picked up by major legacy media resources in the West, has caused understandable consternation in some circles about whether or not they are genuine. After all, these are the same newspapers, outlets, and television networks that have pumped out story after debunked Russia-related story over the years and decades, from the claim that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan, to the allegation that Moscow meddled in America’s elections in 2016 and secretly installed a “Manchurian Candidate” named Donald Trump.

“We don’t have a position,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told Sputnik when asked about the leaks. “Maybe it’s a fake, deliberate misinformation.”

Ryabkov explained that since Washington is a key party to the Ukraine conflict and is waging a hybrid war against Russia, the documents may be a ploy to mislead the Russian side. “I’m not confirming anything, but understand that various scenarios are conceivable here,” he said.

Publicly, at least, officials in Washington have treated the leaks as if they’re the real thing. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin vowed that his department would “turn over every rock” until the “source” of the leaks was found and their extent clarified. CIA chief William Burns echoed Austin’s performance, calling the leaks “deeply unfortunate” and saying they were something the US government “takes extremely seriously.”

Amid reports that the Pentagon has been trying to scrub the leaked docs from the net, Twitter CEO Elon Musk sarcastically quipped that “yeah, you can totally delete things from the internet – it works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all.”

Kiev, predictably, has blamed Moscow, calling the leaks a “Russian propaganda ploy.” Chinese media dismissed these assertions, suggesting that if Russia had gotten its hands on the documents, it would likely hold onto them and use them to its advantage against Ukraine and NATO instead of spreading them online.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the leaks “quite interesting.” As for the suggestion that Moscow might somehow be involved, he said that “the tendency to constantly blame Russia for everything is a widespread disease right now.”

The truth about who leaked the documents and why may never be found. However, a stream of retired US officials, Washington-based security advisors, and CIA analysts have told Sputnik that the “leaks” may be an attempt by “dissenters” and “realists” within the US security state establishment to provide Washington with a much-needed “offramp” from the ever-escalating conflict with Russia in Ukraine before it turns into a world war.

SMDH...., Airman Teixeira - You Gone Learn Today!!!

 NYTimes  |  The F.B.I. on Thursday was preparing to enter the home of a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who is linked to an online group at the center of a trove of leaked classified U.S. intelligence documents that have upended relations with American allies and exposed weaknesses in the Ukrainian military.

The national guardsman, who was first identified by The New York Times as Jack Teixeira, oversaw an online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

On Thursday, an armored vehicle and about a dozen uniformed officers, most wearing tactical gear and holding weapons, were outside the cordoned-off home.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak the government documents to the private online group. One official said he might have information relevant to the investigation.

Starting months ago, the authorities say, one of the users of the online group uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events.

The New York Times spoke with four members of the Thug Shaker Central chat group, where Airman Teixeira served as group administrator.

While the gaming friends would not identify the group’s leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira.

Here’s what else to know:

• The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

• Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative, and started to get wider attention only after one of the teenage members took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet.

• On Thursday, President Biden told reporters that the United States was “getting close” to finding answers about the leak. Senior law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, expect an arrest in the case over the next day or two.

• The leaked documents reveal sensitive material — maps of Ukrainian air defenses and a review of South Korea’s secret plans to deliver ammunition to Ukraine — but it is the immediate relevance of the intelligence that most worries White House and Pentagon officials: Some of the documents appear to be barely 40 days old.