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Left the Chat: No 5. Thug Shaker Central

SpongeBob forums. Edgy memes. Video games about zombies. Helen goes down the rabbit hole to discover the source of a classified document leak.

When investigative journalist Aric Toler saw a handful of supposedly fake classified documents online, he had a hunch - what if they were real? The only way to find out was to hunt for the original source.

It was a journey that took him through the deep internet, beyond the reach of search engines. He scoured through chat forums about SpongeBob SquarePants, infiltrated servers named after edgy memes, and found a vital clue in screenshots of a video game about zombies. Eventually, Toler got his man - and his identity was not at all what you might expect.

At the heart of this story is the chat service Discord - a casual, conversational space without which, Toler thinks, his unlikely leaker would never have posted classified documents online.

A Tempo & Talker production for 麻豆官网首页入口 Radio 4

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29 minutes

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  • Wed 1 May 2024 09:30
  • Sat 4 May 2024 21:30

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