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The person who allegedly leaked hundreds of highly classified documents on a Discord server over the past few months is a 21-year-old with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to new reports from the New York Times and Washington Post. Why did a 21-year-old have access to such sensitive military information? According to the Post, the suspect was an IT tech, giving him access to more information than he normally would have had.
The alleged leaker, identified as Jack Teixeira, posted documents to a private online chat server on Discord, a messaging service that first became popular with gamers. The Discord group had between 20 and 30 people, according to the Times, and Teixeira apparently was sharing highly classified documents for months before they were leaked more widely to social media platforms like Twitter and Telegram.
When Teixeira’s name and age were revealed in the Times on Thursday morning, there were many questions about why someone so young had access to documents that included CIA threat assessments of geopolitical adversaries like North Korea as well as very current battle plans of the war in Ukraine. It turns out, being involved in technology allegedly allowed Teixeira a special kind of access someone in his position would not typically have.
“One person familiar with Teixeira said he was a junior member of the military, but had access to highly sensitive information through his role as an IT tech within the military organization,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The open source intelligence outlet Bellingcat was the first to report over the weekend that classified documents were first being leaked on Discord servers, including a chat group focused on the video game Minecraft. But we now understand the leaks likely originated on a different Discord server named Thug Shaker Central. A Bellingcat reporter, Aric Toler, started working with the Times for its own reports this week and says he tracked down Teixeira through his online gaming profile on Steam.
The Washington Post published a bombshell report late Wednesday about the person who leaked the documents, according to interviews with other members of Thug Shaker Central. But the Post didn’t name Teixeira on Wednesday night. The New York Times first reported his name as a person of interest Thursday morning.
The FBI has been hunting for the leaker, but the Post reported last night that the Thug Shaker Central server was a tight-knit community composed mostly of teenage boys who refused to give Teixeira’s name or location to investigators.
U.S. authorities only became aware of the leaked in early April when documents started appearing on Russian-language accounts of the social media platform Telegram. Documents also started showing up on Twitter.
Discord has reportedly been working with U.S. authorities, according to Reuters, but Twitter CEO Elon Musk has apparently refused to take down any documents under the theory that once something is on the internet, it’s virtually impossible to delete.
There have been no reports that Teixeira has been arrested yet as of this writing, but based on the latest reports from the New York Times, he’s fully expecting it. At least one reporter from the Times visited Teixeira’s house on Thursday morning and spoke with the suspect’s mother along with another man.
“When asked if Airman Teixeira was there and willing to speak, the man said: ‘He needs to get an attorney if things are flowing the way they are going right now. The Feds will be around soon, I’m sure,’” the Times reports.
