Dhe National Guardsman arrested in connection with the release of military secrets was brought before a magistrate in Boston on Friday. He was charged with storing and disseminating classified information. FBI agents arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira on Thursday in North Dighton, Massachusetts. US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Washington the man was detained in connection with the “unauthorized removal, storage and transmission of classified information.” The suspect is accused of violating the Espionage Act. If convicted, he faces up to ten years in prison.
Teixeira is said to have led a chat group founded in 2020 on the Discord platform popular with video gamers and published classified information there that was later disseminated on the open network by a minor member of the group. This is how they got to Telegram and Twitter, among others.
For the government, the matter is most uncomfortable
Some members of the group, which is said to have included 25 to 30 people, are said to have been foreigners, including Russians and Ukrainians. Teixeira’s Massachusetts National Guard unit is the Cape Cod-based 102nd Reconnaissance Squadron, which is responsible for global precision reconnaissance, combat mission support and homeland security. Teixeira’s job was network defense. Although he had only been with the National Guard since 2019, Teixeira had a top-secret clearance.
Members of the chat group said the man, whom they dubbed “OG” and whose identity they did not reveal, was neither an agent for a foreign service nor a whistleblower investigating wrongdoing. He considered the state to be encroaching and wanted to inform the members of the group about secrets that the government was hiding from the Americans. Chat group members also noted that Teixeira boasted about his access to secrets.
The matter is extremely unpleasant for the American government: the media tracked down the suspect before the FBI got hold of it. In addition, the question arises as to how well the intelligence services protect classified information, which not only contains military secrets related to the Ukraine war, but also intelligence obtained from the surveillance of partners. President Joe Biden sought to downplay the matter: To his knowledge, the documents did not contain any real-time information that would have major consequences, he said on Thursday during his visit to Dublin. He is not concerned about the data leak itself, but that it happened in the first place. Foreign Minister Antony Blinken tried to limit the damage and called allies.
The Pentagon rated the data leak as a “very high security risk”. A Defense Department spokesman said it was “important to understand that we have strict guidelines.” He added: “This was a premeditated, criminal act, a violation of these guidelines.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin assembled the Pentagon leadership on Thursday to draw conclusions from the affair. He later said he ordered a review to prevent such leaks in the future. The central problem is that a large number of people have security clearances that give them access to classified information.