A 21-year-old airman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard who's accused of leaking

classified documents to his friends on the internet was charged today under the S.B.

and Aj Act.

The charges are unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information

and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.

The Department of Justice says Jack Tashera, who went by Jack the Dripper on Discord,

started leaking classified information months ago before the government caught on possibly

as late as this week.

Coming up on today's point in a world in which a lot of us believe the government is able

to keep tabs on us, why did it take so long for the government to realize what was happening

to its private stuff in the most public place, the internet?

It's today explained I'm Noel King with Erin Banco, Erin covers intelligence for Politico,

and she's been following the path of the leaked government documents.

So it appears that these first documents appeared on social media platform called Discord,

which is essentially just another sort of messaging social media platform.

We're still learning sort of the extent to which they in frequency with which they were posted,

but it appears that last year is when they first began to appear.

And tell me about their trajectory.

I understand they first appeared in one Discord server, then they kind of spread what happened there.

That's right. So what we know is that there was a very small Discord channel server

called Thugs Shaker Central.

There were about 20 to 25 people that were members of this group, mostly younger men,

...