Yes, part of a Nazi ploy to prompt a war between the U.S. and Russia.
Clancy had some … eerie fucking insight.
M-disc.
Best form of offline storage available. My machine is equipped, but my stock is at another location. Will need to relocate before I can copy directly to M-Disc. Not sure how message will self-destruct (if Gray Fish or something similar has pegged all of us) - but so long as I can get set up and rip to M-Disc, it will survive the nuclear holocaust.
Also, I think the U.S. military is largely behind this. That is why the Presidency was so important, and that is why it took time for this plan to swing into action. The overwhelming majority of the military are patriots - or, at least, once woken to the reality of the world, they are. They are not people who would go along so willingly with a plan to destroy America, if they knew that is what it was about.
My brother … won't say where he serves… but he got rather quick with me when I brought up Q-Anon. I got the sense they'd gotten a brief that something was up and coming hot. He's a patriot to the core, and - well… a lot of good people in our armed forces who want to wear our flag with pride and honor - reflecting our values as a nation.
It's possible that there's some manner of encryption in the file.
It would also be rather easy to hide info within the .jpg file. Big deal about being able to run executable lines within jpg files like a decade ago. meta data hasn't changed much since then.
M-disc is little known at this point. Uses a ceramic layer that is ablated with the write head, rather than a die color change. It's an optical medium - and could really only be made better with a sapphire/spinel optical substrate to make it virtually scratch-proof. The ceramic layer is stable to geological time scales - so it really is down to the life of the substrate.