Leak could boost Putin's war by revealing how US is spying on Russia
An FBI probe was launched Friday to determine the source of the leak, however a senior official told The New York Times that tracking down the perpetrator could prove difficult because a large number of officials have the security clearances needed to access the information.
Outraged that Meta Platforms was allowing social media users in Ukraine to post messages such as “Death to the Russian invaders,” Moscow blocked Instagram this week, having already stopped access to Facebook because of what it said were restrictions by the platform on Russian media.
The estimated Russian death toll is of a scale similar to that of the Battle of Iwo Jima, where 6,852 US troops were killed and 19,000 were wounded during five weeks of fighting Japanese forces in the most intense phase of the Pacific theatre of World War Two
Video posted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shows military ambulances driving through the Belarusian city of Homel in early March, with employees at the region’s clinical hospital claiming more than 2,500 bodies have already been shipped back to Russia as of March 13.
The TV watchdog said RT’s licensee, ANO TV Novosti, is ‘not fit and proper’ to hold a licence amid 29 ongoing investigations into the ‘due impartiality of the news and current affairs coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’.
However, the scandal is already being noted as one of the most damaging national security breaches in recent memory, which may have further implications into the legitimacy of US espionage into the future.
“The ‘guardians’ of free speech have in all seriousness allowed users of their social media to wish death upon the Russian military,” Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, wrote on the messaging app Telegram.
March 18 (Reuters) – Russia on Friday demanded that Alphabet Inc’s Google stop spreading what it called threats against Russian citizens on its YouTube video-sharing platform, a move that could presage an outright block of the service on Russian territory.
If whispers are accurate, Eddie Hearn will confirm in the near future that the fight between Benn and Chris Eubank Jnr is on. Not with a British Boxing Board of Control licence in Benn’s pocket, because they want a resolution to the inconvenient truth of Benn’s two failed drugs tests, first revealed in the Daily Mail six months ago.
A statement released by the regulator on Friday said: ‘We consider the volume and potentially serious nature of the issues raised within such a short period to be of great concern – especially given RT’s compliance history, which has seen the channel fined £200,000 for previous due impartiality breaches.
The network, which has been described as Vladimir Putin’s ‘personal propaganda tool’, was previously fined £200,000 for ‘serious and repeated’ breaches of impartiality rules over a string of 2018 broadcasts on the Salisbury poisonings and the Syrian war.
Pentagon officials are said to be launching a huge probe into the leak. The leaked documents shared online – at least some of which are believed to be genuine – consist of photographs of printed sheets of paper.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday wrote a fierce criticism of foreign social media firms, mentioning by name both Meta and YouTube, but he hinted that the door leading to their possible return to the Russian market would be left ajar.
Toler, whose investigative consortium has done several probes of Russian intelligence operations, said he believed he had traced the posting back to Thug Shaker Central on Discord, which was then reposting by users to a bigger group.
The documents – while up to several months old – offer detailed insights into which Russian intelligence agencies have been most compromised, and clues as to how the United States has gleaned so much secret Kremlin information.
‘There was a lot of just sitting out in the rain, but then there would be little parts in the cloud and then a rainbow would form out of nowhere. And it would sit there for maybe 10 minutes. The light would cascade across the landscape. And then the storm would come back 10 minutes later and we would be in a torrential downpour again.’
American officials told the New York Times that while the leak underscores the Pentagon’s capacity to collect information on Russia’s strategies, it remains to be seen whether their sources of information will be hampered by the revelations.
The leak comes amid speculation that a wave of classified document breaches could be being orchestrated by Russia, in what was described by a senior intelligence official as ‘a nightmare for the Five Eyes’ – a reference to the intelligence sharing agreement between the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
He recalls: ‘It was bittersweet in a sense because the weather was so tough to deal with that the wind, I mean, there were 60mph winds at times where you could barely stand up… you could barely set up a camera. And it rained, I think, every single day that I was there, for about two weeks.
