Why a young guy was entrusted with access to confidential information
A suspect in the Pentagon leak has been detained in the US. It turned out to be 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, who is believed to have posted documents on the Discord messenger group exposing United States spying on adversaries and allies and revealing intelligence about the conflict in Ukraine.
Jack Teixeira, who served in the Massachusetts Air National Guard since 2019, was detained by FBI agents at his home in the town of North Dayton. News footage shows a young man with close-cropped dark hair, wearing an olive green T-shirt and red shorts, being led towards a group of agents standing outside an armored personnel carrier.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that Teixeira was being held in custody » ;in connection with the investigation of the alleged unauthorized seizure, storage and transfer of classified national defense information”.
The language used by the Attorney General suggests that Teixeira will face charges under the Espionage Act. Each charge can carry up to 10 years in prison, and prosecutors can treat each leaked document as a separate item in their indictment. So a young person may face a very long time.
Find «Author» leakage proved to be relatively easy. He had a legacy on social media, so it took a little time for the feds and even journalists who knew how to analyze data to reach Jack.
Clues for the investigation were contained in messages posted on Discord, where Teixeira had been publishing for many years posts about weapons, games, and your favorite memes.
Prior to Teixeira's arrest, the Associated Press managed to contact an anonymous member of the Thug Shaker Central online chat, where Teixeira appeared under the nickname “O.G.”. In it, two dozen enthusiasts talked about their favorite types of weapons, the group also discussed the conflict in Ukraine.
This chat, created at the height of the pandemic in 2020, was limited and available only by invitation.
“O.G.” published materials for months, which, according to him, were classified. Another group member shared some files a few weeks ago in another — and from there they seem to have spread over the Internet.
It is known that Teixeira, who is described by his neighbors as a quiet and polite young man, was a first-class pilot assigned to the reconnaissance unit of the Air Force. But in fact, he was an IT specialist in charge of military communications networks. The young man was engaged in maintaining the work of the Internet at airbases. In this role, Teixeira had a higher security clearance.
Teixeira opposed many aspects of US government policy and denounced the security agencies «because they are run by elitist politicians.» At the same time, the interlocutor of the agency admitted that he does not know why Teixeira went to military service at all. He often expressed regret about this: «He even said that he would kick my ass if I thought about the service myself.»
As a teenager, Jack Teixeira would sometimes wear camouflage to school and carry a «dictionary-sized book on weapons» with him. He acted in a way that made some students uncomfortable — making racist comments or muttering offensive things about those around him under his breath.
The AP source added: “O.G.” was a devout Christian. That did not stop him from appearing on the video, which The Washington Post journalists managed to view. A young man was filmed at a shooting range holding a large rifle while making racist and anti-Semitic slurs on camera.
The source stressed that he does not believe that Teixeira leaked the documents to harm the US government or for ideological reasons. The young man, when the scandal with the leak became global, was seriously scared. And he was fully aware that he did not have long to be free.
In the last message to his bandmates, the leaker asked them to «keep a low profile and remove any information that may be related to him», including any copies secret documents.
How did it happen that such a young guy (and even emotionally unstable, as well as with anti-establishment racist views in addition) was entrusted with confidential materials? And how did he manage to remove it from a secure facility without arousing suspicion?
Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder explained that it is the nature of the military to trust very young soldiers with a high level of security clearance. Soldiers who had just graduated from high school went to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war zones, often using top-secret intelligence and programs to fight adversaries, he said.
“We place great responsibility on our members at a very early age. Think of the young platoon sergeant and the responsibility and trust we place on these men to lead the troops into battle, – says Patrick Ryder.
Well, as far as access to classified documents is concerned, Ryder noted: «Each of us signs a non-disclosure agreement, so everything indicates that this is a criminal act.» .
American experts note: Teixeira's colleagues are engaged in «very delicate and vital» work. work. They operate drones that perform reconnaissance missions in support of the air force and fighters on the ground in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, as well as in support of special operations teams that can be deployed anywhere on classified missions. This means that units need access to a wide range of intelligence gathering and analysis as they can operate in multiple theaters against multiple threats.
Their other mission is to protect against cyberattacks, and it is even broader in scope. And, willy-nilly, secret data is at the disposal of young people.
Now the Pentagon has attended to measures to protect classified information and revise the mailing lists of confidential documents. One of the important questions for the US Department of Defense concerns how often and thoroughly counterintelligence officials check who has access to information on an ongoing basis.
In Ireland, Joe Biden tried to downplay the consequences of what is happening. «As far as I know, there is nothing there that would be of great importance.»
Nevertheless, the New York Times newspaper reported that she had read about 300 documents, only a part of which has so far been published in the media — this indicates that the damage to US national security may be more serious than previously recognized by the US authorities.