On April 13, air national guardsman Jack Teixeira was arrested for the leak of highly classified information regarding all levels of U.S. national security. And he did it all through the popular gaming communication app, Discord. Teixeira was only 21 years old and running a chat called “Thug Shaker Central,” where a group of 20-30 young men, and even some teenagers, regularly shared racist memes and their thoughts on guns and video games. From there it only spread, leaking to a large Youtuber-based chat group, and eventually to a Minecraft group with thousands of members, where months after the initial leak they were discovered by U.S. investigators.
The leaked material is said to contain important details about the Russia-Ukraine war, including contingency plans if President Zelensky or President Putin were to die during the conflict, plans to source weapons and warped numbers concerning deaths on both sides. The documents also make it clear the U.S. spies on both its enemies and allies, information that not only puts intelligence sources at risk but also has the potential to shake the foundations of global foreign policy.
The quantity of knowledge the U.S. holds about Russia’s internal intelligence operations revealed in these documents is astounding and allows the U.S. to provide immediate warnings to Ukraine of impending Russian attacks. Now that the Russians are aware of this, that advantage could be gone, potentially costing the Ukrainians the war and their freedom.
The gravity of this leak can not be understated; it could upend years of foreign policy and the careful planning of the U.S. and its allies in support of Ukraine. The question remains: how did a 21-year-old air national guardsman manage to spill the secrets of the strongest global power so effortlessly?
Teixeira was one of the millions of government employees with top security clearance. In his role, which was essentially Pentagon tech support, he was privy to many national secrets for which he had signed a lifetime nondisclosure agreement. However, these documents were meant as final briefings for the joint chiefs, meaning they should have been extremely highly classified.
Teixeira was not only able to read them himself, but fold them up and take them to photograph without being caught by any sort of internal security. The Biden administration continues to dodge questions about Teixeira’s security clearance, instead stating that they are not concerned by the content of the leak.
This leak is part of a larger pattern of national security leaks recently, with classified documents found in the homes of former Vice President Mike Pence, former President Trump and President Joe Biden. Not all classified documents are as crucial to keep secret as those released in the latest leak through Discord, but the quantity of government officials taking high-level classified documents to their unsecured homes is very concerning.
As unethical as government secrets can be, some are kept secret for a reason: to keep the U.S. and its intelligence efforts safe. As U.S. citizens we should be very wary of how the security of our country is being handled. If top-secret data about espionage sources can be so easily leaked over Discord, imagine how easily our personal information can be found by foreign powers.
