Why Discord is at the heart of a major US intelligence leak
A military intelligence breach is being blamed on users of popular gaming platform Discord, after classified documents were uploaded there and disseminated widely across the internet. The person who allegedly uploaded those sensitive materials has since been identified, in part thanks to another gaming platform, Steam, and arrested under the Espionage Act.
The FBI arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira on Thursday in connection to an investigation into the leak of classified military documents that spread on social media earlier in April. Teixeira is a United States guardsman with an intelligence division of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to the New York Times. He was charged in Boston on Friday with two counts in violation of the Espionage Act: the unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. Teixeira could face up to 15 years in prison, the BBC reported.
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Teixeira allegedly published snapshots of printed classified briefings on a small Discord server called Thug Shaker Central, where roughly two dozen members, including teenagers, posted racist memes and talked about guns and video games like Call of Duty and Halo, according to research and training director Aric Toler of investigative collective Bellingcat. (Toler said on Twitter that Teixera’s Steam account, which led to him being identified, showed Arma 3, PUBG: Battlegrounds,Garry’s Mod,Counter-Strike, and Hearts of Iron 4.)
U.S. government officials have confirmed the authenticity of the majority of the documents, which detail strategy around the Russian war on Ukraine and other sensitive information about Canada, South Korea, Israel, Egypt, and
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