China Claims Alleged Pentagon Leaks Show U.S. Is the ‘Biggest Global Cyber Thief’

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday claimed the allegedly leaked classified documents from the Pentagon “clearly show that the US has long used its tech edge to conduct indiscriminate secret theft, surveillance and eavesdropping on countries in the world, including its allies.”

China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin tipped his hand by complaining that the United States is outraged by China’s rampant technology theft and government-sponsored hacking and has convinced its allies that Chinese networking products cannot be trusted. He pointed to the purported Pentagon leak as further proof that “the U.S. is the origin of cyber warfare, the biggest spreader of advanced cyber weapons and the biggest global cyber thief.”

Teed up by a very helpfully phrased question from Chinese media at his press conference, Wang launched into a long diatribe about the Stuxnet virus, the WannaCry ransomware attack (which was based on code stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency), and Edward Snowden’s exposure of classified documents, along with some more fanciful rants about the U.S. supposedly manipulating cybersecurity standards to further its own nefarious hacking ends.

Wang said the alleged Pentagon leak, which included transcripts of conversations between foreign officials that were ostensibly monitored by U.S. intelligence, proved the U.S. only promotes “democratic values” as “a pretext and a tool” for “selfish gains.”

“It is in the international community’s common interest to end the U.S.’s lawlessness on cyber theft and reveal its hypocrisy on cyber security,” he pontificated.

China’s state-run Global Times supported Wang’s tirade on Wednesday by quoting “Chinese experts” who called the largely-unverified Pentagon leak “another PRISM incident,” a reference to the cyber-surveillance program Snowden betrayed.

“Chinese experts on Tuesday said it gives a rare chance to glimpse into how the U.S. spies on its allies, which will exacerbate the lack of strategic mutual trust between them and deal a heavy blow to Washington’s strategy of maintaining global hegemony,” the Global Times wrote hopefully.

To date, every foreign government mentioned in the “Pentagon leak” has denied the accuracy of the supposedly monitored conversations. Some of those intercepts, like the one that purportedly caught Egypt planning to send a huge amount of artillery ammunition to Russia, could have profound impacts on U.S. foreign policy if they were legitimate.

The U.S. government has yet to confirm the authenticity of any of the documents and has said some of them are outright digital forgeries. On the other hand, it could be fairly said that the Biden administration is nervously acting as if some of the documents might be legitimate. 

The White House on Wednesday confirmed that at least one assertion made by the leaker is true: the U.S. does have a “small military presence” of special forces troops on the ground in Ukraine. The documents claimed America had 14 such officers deployed.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said these troops were attached to the U.S. Embassy and were helping to “work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine.”

The provenance of the allegedly leaked documents remains unknown, but on Wednesday the Washington Post claimed to have new information about the “Discord leaker,” the first known individual to post the documents on a text and voice-messaging platform called Discord.

According to the report, this individual is a “young, charismatic gun enthusiast” who was “searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic.” 

Under the user name “OG,” this person reportedly began posting messages filled with intelligence jargon and scans of secret documents last year, which other members of his small Discord group — mostly young men and teenage boys — initially dismissed as lengthy, incomprehensible rants. Only recently did some of the members realize “OG” might be posting actual classified information.

The story blew up into a major media event when another user began sharing some of the posts and documents in a larger Discord group.

Members of the now-shuttered group who spoke to the Washington Post said they knew the real name of “OG” but would not disclose it while a federal investigation was ongoing. It was not clear how “OG” obtained the materials if they are genuine.