The Discord Leaker: The Case of the Most Unorthodox National Security Leaks in History

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last week, federal officials arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, accusing him of having leaked hundreds of pages of classified Pentagon documents on a Discord server. The documents offer rare insights into the war in Ukraine and the extent of military casualties and reveal the presence of U.S. and other NATO nations' special forces clandestinely operating in the war zone. They also document how the conflict is spilling over into the Middle East and shed light on U.S. penetration of Russian military plans and U.S. spy efforts, including against American allies and the United Nations secretary general. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and national security editor Vanessa Gezari discuss the document leak and analyze what we know and don’t know about the young airman accused of distributing the documents, initially to a small group of gamers and gun enthusiasts in a private internet chatroom. They also discuss the media's role in identifying the suspect using open source clues left by Texeira and his friends in the months leading up to his arrest as well as what the accused 21 year old might face in an Espionage Act trial.

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Transcript

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0:30.0	Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Jeremy Scayhill.
0:36.9	And I'm Mataza Hussain. Today our colleague Vanessa Gazari is joining us. She's the National
0:42.2	Security Editor for the Intercept.
0:43.9	Hi.
0:44.9	Hey Vanessa, thanks so much for being with us here on Intercepted. And we're, we asked
0:50.8	you to come on the show today because there's sort of a wild national security story that's
0:55.3	been simmering or brewing that involves a leak of some top secret US documents. And the
1:02.2	reason that I say it's been simmering instead of, you know, exploding onto the scene like that
1:07.0	were Snowden documents or when the Chelsea Manning documents were revealed by WikiLeaks
1:12.2	is that these documents that we're going to talk about today began circulating online
1:18.2	months ago. We understand last December. And they began circulating on the internet
1:24.2	apparently without the US government knowing that they were out there without any media outlets
1:30.4	knowing they were out there. And in fact, a pretty small group of what we understand to
1:37.3	be sort of teenage gamers or young adult gamers, they had privileged access to top secret
1:45.4	documents. Some of them were even classified at the sensitive compartmented information
1:50.5	level, which is a very high classification level. And these were like real time documents
1:56.8	that related to the war in Ukraine to US spying and hacking capabilities against Russia to
2:05.6	Chinese military planning to the state of Taiwan's missile defense and air defense system
2:12.0	to information on the US spying on its own allies and a whole slew of other sensitive information.
2:20.2	And as we currently understand the facts, there are potentially hundreds of these secret
2:24.9	documents that began appearing on a discord server that was known as thug shaker central
2:32.6	last December. And what's particularly fascinating about all of this is that the FBI or the
	...

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