US Air National Guardsman gets 15 years for leaking military secrets on a Minecraft Discord server: 'The scope of his betrayal is breathtaking… the amount of damage immeasurable'

pcgamer.com:

A 22 year-old former member of the US Air National Guard has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing classified American military secrets and sharing them on a Discord server ostensibly focused on Minecraft (thanks, The Register). Jack Teixeira had been employed by the service since September 2019 and worked for the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts until his arrest last year.

Teixeira's first few years passed without notable incident before, in early 2022, he began to access top secret documents and photographs. Some of these he would later post on the private Discord server in February 2022, from where they found their way onto public social media channels.

The secret documents included details of America's involvement in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, information about negotiations between South Korea and the USA over ammunition, and China's development of a supersonic spy drone.

A US Air Force report made public last year concluded Teixeira was the only airman behind the leak, though determined that his chain of command bears some responsibility for letting the classified data dump happen on its watch. It said Teixeira «was observed viewing intelligence content on TS-SCI [Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information] websites» in August 2022, an incident that his supervisor did not document as they should have, and that shortly afterwards Teixeira was caught viewing secret documents while making notes on a Post-It.

Teixeira would later admit he had begun posting classified information as a way of boasting to his friends. He was a keen gamer and the Discord server concerned had around 25 members, all of whom seemed to share similar interests in cheery topics like assassination, conspiracy theories and mass murder, as well as poor old Minecraft. Teixeira would initially write down details from documents he was viewing at work, take the notes home, and transcribe them: Later, as he grew bolder, he began