WTH is Going On with the Discord Leaks? Former CIA Field Officer Marc Polymeropoulos Explains How It Happened and What It Means
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2023
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
The Ukrainians are running out of munitions and the war is predicted to endure past 2023; China is debuting new missiles that have the ability to penetrate US defenses; Egypt Is toying with supporting Russia in attacking Ukraine; ISIS is evolving. These are just a handful of the revelations from the viral Discord leaks, a set of US intelligence documents leaked on the gaming platform Discord and other sites by 21-year-old Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Ways to interpret the fallout are manifold, but lessons learned all point back to US responsibility: that Ukraine will face empty bins is a self-fulfilling prophecy that the US can remedy through a revitalization of its defense industrial base. That Taiwan is at enhanced risk of invasion by China every day is only tempered by US willingness to build up Taiwan’s defense and develop a strategic counter-aggression framework. Content aside, that a 21-year-old kid was able to photograph and share US top secret information, and continue sharing it for 8 months – well, it is not a leap to underscore the importance of tightening US intelligence security measures to prevent this from ever happening again.
Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Polymeropoulos worked for twenty-six years at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before retiring in July 2019 at the Senior Intelligence Service level. He was one of the CIA’s most highly decorated operations officers. He is the author of Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:35.0 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:36.7 | And I'm Mart Tiesin. |
| 0:37.7 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:39.1 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:41.6 | Mark, what the hell's going on now? |
| 0:43.9 | Well, what the hell is going on is we've had a massive intelligence failure in the form of a 21-year-old junior enlisted member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who is able to obtain |
| 0:55.9 | hundreds of pages of highly classified intelligence. I mean, Finnish CIA products, details on |
| 1:01.3 | US spying on our allies, details of our penetration of the Russian military intelligence agency, |
| 1:07.5 | details of the US government assessment of Taiwan's vulnerability to a Chinese attack, |
| 1:11.9 | our knowledge of advances in Chinese cyber and hypersonic capabilities. And he took this stuff |
| 1:19.1 | and shared it with his friends on a gaming chat room called Discord in basically not in the |
| 1:26.7 | behest of a foreign power, but to show off to his |
| 1:29.1 | friends. And the U.S. for eight months, the U.S. government didn't even know it was happening. |
| 1:34.0 | It only found out when some of the people started posting some stuff on social media and it started |
| 1:38.7 | leaking out. And then all of a sudden, because of that, the U.S. government found out and arrested this guy. |
| 1:45.0 | But this is just a, you know, for lack of a better word, a you know what show. |
| 1:51.5 | I think what you're trying to say there, Mark, is we got an explicit rating. |
| 1:55.0 | I could say shit show, can I? |
| 1:56.4 | Yes. |
... |
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