meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Slate Daily Feed

How Gamers Leaked Classified Pentagon Docs

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Society & Culture, Business, News

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Discord is a place to share a community online. Most often, it's for gaming. So why did classified intelligence from the Pentagon end up on a small server whose main interests seem to be video games, military equipment and memes? And how?


Guest: Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for the Washington Post.

Host: Lizzie O’Leary


If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Heads up everyone, this is a fast-moving story, and we recorded this on Thursday night.

0:06.9

Also, there's a little swearing in this episode.

0:09.8

Consider yourselves warned.

0:11.2

Here's the show.

0:30.0

That is the voice of Wow Mao, a YouTuber whose channel is mostly weird meme videos and

0:36.7

mildly insane thought experiments like which US president would you smoke weed with.

0:43.5

He also runs a Discord server where this happened.

0:53.0

On the first of March, a mod on my Discord server shared 30 plus leaked documents concerning

0:58.7

the Russia Ukraine war, and one month later, my name is showing up on news sites such

1:03.6

as Forbes, the telegraph, and the Washington Post.

1:07.0

A massive trove of secret documents about the war in Ukraine and various military and

1:12.6

intelligence operations.

1:14.8

Things the US government really did not want bouncing all over the internet.

1:20.2

But they did, on a series of Discord servers, including Wow Mao's.

1:25.8

I can sort of understand how sharing big private military secrets could be a funny thing

1:31.4

to do among your incident friends, but come on.

1:34.0

Take care of yourself and stay away from doing stuff like this.

1:37.3

The servers are basically internet communities where members can post messages, share videos

1:42.9

and memes, and talk with one another.

1:44.9

They're popular with gamers, and there is, to be frank, a lot of shit posting.

1:52.7

But Wow Mao's server is not where these documents first showed up online.

1:58.0

Reporters trace them back to another Discord server, and a poster who turned out to be a

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Slate and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.