Air Force National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, 21, maintained a small circle of friends on the Internet. According to the group members, he wanted to impress his friends with the documents.
Air Force National Guard man Jack Teixeira21, was arrested Thursday in North Dighton, Mass., on suspicion of leaking classified U.S. documents to the public.
Attorney General of the United States of Merrick Garland according to the arrest was made in connection with an investigation concerning the unauthorized transfer, possession and transmission of secret information.
Teixeira will be brought before the court today, Friday. Garland’s remarks suggest Teixeira will be charged under the Espionage Act. Teixeira could face tens of years in prison if found guilty.
Teixeira had access to classified documents
As of 2019, Teixeira, who hails from near Boston, worked at an Air National Guard base in eastern Massachusetts.
Teixeira was trained as a network traffic specialist for the base. His responsibility was, for example, the maintenance of his department’s communication networks.
Teixeira was working at the base until his arrest. After the documents became public, he had tried to keep a low profile and he had, for example, changed his phone number.
Teixeira, despite his young age and relatively little work experience, had access to classified information, which has caused a wide debate in the United States about the security clearances of administration employees.
Newspaper For The New York Times (you’re moving to another service) According to the US Department of Defense officials who spoke to (NYT), at least thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of employees have access to the top secret information. Less arcane secret information can be accessed by an even larger number of people.
– Each of us signs a confidentiality agreement. Anyone with a security clearance. “All indications are that this is a criminal act,” a spokesperson for the US Department of Defense said Patrick Ryder commented on the matter on Thursday.
The documents were intended for the information of a small circle
Newspaper For The Washington Post (you’re moving to another service) who spoke, an acquaintance of Teixeira describes him as a patriot, a devout Catholic and a libertarian with an interest in guns and doubts about the direction of the United States.
Teixeira was active on the internet instant messaging service Discord, where he hosted the Thug Shaker Central group. The group, which operated by invitation, had a good twenty members.
The members of the group were united by, among other things, playing video games and an interest in weapons and military equipment. The group’s language use is said to have been widely inappropriate and racist. There is also a video of Teixeira that he shared with the group, in which he first shouts racist and anti-Semitic slurs and then shoots with a rifle.
Teixeira, who ran the group under the nickname OG, is said to have been slightly older than the other members and the group’s undisputed leader.
Teixeira started sharing information about the documents with the group since the end of last year. At first, he wrote information about the documents in the group chat and later he started sharing photos of the documents. In total, Teixeira shared several hundred pages of secret documents with the group.
From the small group, the photos began to trickle into more public groups on the internet between March and April and finally to the mainstream media.
He wanted to impress his friends
Members of the group have been interviewed by several US newspapers in recent days. Based on the interviews, Teixeira’s obvious goal was to make an impact on the other members of the group.
According to a member of the group who spoke to NYT, Teixeira was not in any way Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning’s the kind of character who would have wanted to knowingly expose US intelligence.
– He was a Christian and anti-war, who just wanted to tell his friends what was happening. There are people in Ukraine in our group. We like fighting games and war games, a 17-year-old member of the group commented on the story to NYT.
Based on the messages Teixeira sent to the group, after the documents became public, he was very worried that the authorities might catch him.
Newspaper The Guardian (you are switching to another service) writes that in Teixeira’s last message to the group, he told other members to keep a low profile and delete any information that could lead to him.
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