Online Group Finds Fame For Leaking U.S. Secrets

An online community that followed a YouTube celebrity named wow_mao hosted by social media app Discord is at the center of a sprawling US probe for posting at least 53 top secret intelligence documents, Kellen Browning and Stuart A. Thompson reported for the New York Times.

Photo Insert: The leaks were posted by user wow_mao on Discord.

It turns out that a volunteer moderator in wow-mao’s niche community secured and posted leaked documents detailing secret Pentagon intelligence. Named Lucca in some reports, the moderator is now at the crosshairs of the US Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the CIA.

In an interview, wow_mao, said on Tuesday that he was a 20-year-old college student who lives in Britain. In a YouTube video a day earlier, he said he was an “internet micro-celebrity, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

He describes himself as British and Filipino.

Bellingcat, a Dutch investigative journalism outlet, said it had detected similar documents in January 2023 that popped up in another social media platform but noted the bulk of the documents posted were dated February and March, with some of the papers obviously tampered.

A guide to investigators was the fact that the leaker photographed the documents, thus allowing investigators to find the digital signatures on the documents and the copies, CNN, Associated Press (AP) and Reuters stressed.

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