This is one of the strangest crimes we’ve heard about in a while. This week, a 21-year-old man was arrested by US government agents. The man, Jack Teixeira, allegedly leaked hundreds of confidential documents to his gaming friends through a Discord server.
The New York Times Here is more information about this strange case. Teixeira was a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, and was reportedly trained as a “Cyber Transport Systems Journeyman.” He managed to get hold of these secret documents and started sharing them with his friends on the Discord channel starting in October 2022. It is not known how he got access to the leaked material.
A breakthrough in our investigation came when the team identified a Steam profile named Airman Teixeira that had photos on his Instagram profile of the exact location where the leaked documents were photographed — his childhood. The kitchen counter top in the house. https://t.co/XQAZf2kNV7 pic.twitter.com/DWlkN8xmqK
— Christian Trabert (@trbrtc) April 13, 2023
One of the NYT reporters, Christian Trabert, Posted on Twitter that Teixeira had a Steam account with a link to his Instagram account in his profile. The account contained pictures of his childhood home. They included photos of her kitchen with a countertop that matched the photos of the same countertop where the leaked documents were photographed. The documents allegedly contained information on Ukraine’s war maps and assessments of the Russian military.
Teixeira is now facing charges for violating the Espionage Act, all because he allegedly wanted to impress his friends in his Discord chat group. The whole situation is an embarrassment to the US military intelligence community, which will likely face some big questions about how this man was able to gain access to classified data in the first place.
