Investigating a Massive Online Leak of Government Secrets

The FRONTLINE Dispatch

GBH

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On March 4, 2024, Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira pleaded guilty to charges related to one of the country’s largest leaks of classified information.

How did Teixeira manage to go without notice for months as he leaked hundreds of pages of government documents on Discord, the online chat platform popular with teenage gamers?

Shane Harris and Sam Oakford were part of a team of Washington Post reporters who set out to investigate, and who partnered with FRONTLINE director Tom Jennings. The FRONTLINE/Washington Post documentary The Discord Leaks investigates Teixeira’s online world, his massive leak of national security secrets and the role of platforms like Discord. The documentary also raises tough questions about the military’s vetting of applicants’ online behavior.

Jennings, Harris and Oakford joined host Raney Aronson-Rath to talk about recent developments related to national security leaks, Teixeira’s case and what the documentary reveals.

“What Jack's case shows is this huge vulnerability at the heart of the intelligence apparatus, of an insufficient system for vetting people, and a system that's built so that people can get access to secrets and share them with practically whomever they want,” Harris told Aronson-Rath. “And I think that is going to be a major challenge for the military and the intelligence agencies going forward.”

You can watch The Discord Leaks on FRONTLINE’s website, the FRONTLINE YouTube Channel, and the PBS App. Read The Washington Post’s related reporting at washingtonpost.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In April of last year, a huge leak of classified documents began making headlines.
0:07.0	Top secret documents about the war in Ukraine have appeared on social media.
0:12.0	Investigations are underway into the leak of classified Pentagon documents.
0:16.2	The worst leak of US national security intelligence in many years.
0:20.5	The source of the leak was a young air national guardsman named Jack
0:24.4	Tuxera. In March he pled guilty to sharing intelligent secrets on discord,
0:29.6	the popular chat platform. He kept posting and posting and posting.
0:34.3	He's working in this highly sensitive facility
0:38.1	and then he goes home and hops on to discord.
0:40.7	And it's a racist paranoid anti-Semitic free-for-all.
0:44.0	Washington Post reporter Shane Harris and Sam Oakford have been covering the story since the start.
0:50.0	And they collaborated with Frontline on the documentary, The Discord Leaks.
0:54.4	We were talking to the people who did know who was leaking it.
0:58.0	I spoke to them about their reporting and the latest developments in the story,
1:02.4	along with our director, Tom Jennings.
1:05.4	I'm Raney Errenson Roth, editor-in-chief
1:07.7	and executive producer of Frontline,
1:10.0	and this is the Front Line Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation
1:26.4	committed to excellence in journalism and by the Frontline Journalism Fund
1:30.8	with major support from John and Joanne Hagler.
1:34.0	Support for Frontline Dispatch comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center,
1:38.0	dedicated to providing compassionate care and cancer specialists who are experienced in the cancer you have.
	...

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