As the US administration scrambles to deal with the fallout of the Pentagon Leaks, which resulted in troves of secret documents being released online, more details emerge about the extent of the security breach. Jack Teixeira, 21, who was arrested by the FBI on Thursday, appeared in court to face charges under the Espionage Act of unauthorised removal and retention of classified and national defence information.
A federal magistrate judge ordered him held until a detention hearing next week.
The FBI affidavit unsealed in court Friday revealed that Teixeira, an airman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, allegedly began posting classified information on Discord—a social media platform popular among online gamers—as early as December 2022. According to CNN, Teixeira is believed to have been the head of an online private chat group named 'Thug Shaker Central', on Discord. Investigators stated in the affidavit that at least one of the documents that described the status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movements, was classified at the TS-SCI level, meaning it contains top-secret, sensitive compartmentalised information.
Group members who spoke to the investigators had identified the leaker as the 'O.G.'. The group, with over two dozen memberss, often discussed guns, war updates related to the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and shared memes. Some members also said Teixeira often discussed God and prayed with members of the group.
The CNN reported that after writing his posts for a while, Teixeira started sharing photographs of crumbled-up papers, suggesting they were removed from a secure location. A Discord user told investigators that Teixeira had become concerned he might be discovered transcribing the documents in his workplace, so he started taking them home and photographing them. He was frustrated with the lack of response to his earlier written-up versions of the sensitive information.
Weeks ago, one of the private group's participants shared some of the files in a different chat group and from there they appear to have spread across the Internet. After news broke of the classified documents circulating on the internet, Teixeira started using his computer to search the word 'leak' to check if the probe agencies had found anything.
In a statement acknowledging the extent of the problem that the leaks exposed, President Joe Biden said Friday that he had directed both the military and intelligence community to “take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information.”