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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

I call parallel construction.

Yeah, what they actually did was probably follow WaPo's investigation, which found and publicly announced who it was first, and worked back from that very quickly.

(This is mostly a joke, but...)

Discord gave the FBI his home address.

Alternatively, the “leak” is a controlled disclosure of realistic misinformation.

The “leaker”‘s real life identity then “goes to jail” for 30 years and they work for the government in clandestine services under a new identity. This tactic confuses the enemy, and has the side benefit of scaring your own into being more careful with real classified docs.

If I was unethical enough to work for the security apparatus, the above is definitely something I would do.

If you haven't watched the TV series _The Bureau_, you should. That's the kind of plots they're using.

I was thinking like that too. Many many "leaks" are intentional.

For this one to work, you would have to convince the Russian secret services, a pretty high bar. Usually, leaks just have to pass a sniff test, or not even that, people can just glance over the factual basis for the leak if it's convenient for their world view (e.g. FBI leaking photos from Trump's raid)

None of the way any of this has played out has told me it’s nothing more than major, major chess.

The vast majority of intelligence assets are analysts or sigint, not James Bond-ish operators who can discard identities and their family/friend/etc like a Scooby Doo mask. This is not a plausible thing.

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