21-year-old Jack Teixeira was arrested by the FBI last week in the course of an investigation concerning the leak of classified military documents that spread on social media earlier in April 2023. He faces up to 15 years in prison for two counts of violating the Espionage Act. His crime? He posted photographs of printed, classified briefings on a small Discord server called Thug Shaker Central.
Teixeira leaked over a hundred pages of documents, some of which had detailed information on strategy around the Russian war with Ukraine and intelligence the United States has on a number of countries, including North Korea, China, Egypt, and Iran. The documents have been confirmed to be legitimate by a number of senior US officials, and were compiled from a number of sources.
You may be wondering how he got these documents. Teixeira is an airman serving in the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts National Guard as a Cyber Transports Systems journeyman – essentially, and to put this somewhat reductively, an IT guy. He didn’t work directly with intelligence, but his department was responsible for packaging intelligence for global senior military leaders, and he had the clearance to work on the networks used to store this information.
He started out taking pictures of classified information at work, but got scared that he would be caught – so he started taking the documents home and taking pictures of them there instead. He shared these to the Thug Shaker Central Discord, a server where roughly two dozen members, mostly teenagers, played war games, posted racist memes, talked about guns, and discussed the war in Ukraine. Teixeira was older than most of the server’s members and seemingly wanted to impress them. So he sent classified documents to a bunch of teenage gamers.
Naturally, the leaks started spreading, because what else would you expect from a bunch of teenagers on Discord? Members posted them to other Discord servers, including one for YouTuber wow_mao, and later, the Minecraft Earth Map server. The leak spread to thousands more, and was then discovered by the US government through social media. This led to Teixeira’s arrest last week.
I want to be clear: leaking documents is not an inherently bad thing. There are good leaks, and there are bad leaks. A good leak reveals information necessary for the full understanding of issues of public interest, without harming people. This was not that. If it had been well-intended, this information could have gone to a journalist who would have been able to redact it to release information for the public good and reduce the harm done, for example, to Ukrainian civilians currently entrapped in a war with Russia. Instead, it was an irresponsible dissemination of classified information to a bunch of racist teenage gamers, for their approval.
It’s terrifying to think that matters of national security, which have huge, widespread consequences for people whose lives hang in the balance, are being put in the hands of 21-year-olds conditioned by their social circles to act like dickhead edgelords for attention. Discord servers are largely private spaces and it’s up to moderators of those specific servers to decide what is acceptable (Texeira was the moderator of Thug Shaker Central).
Discord has community guidelines, but with 150 million monthly active users, things slip through the cracks. It’s relatively easy for servers to become safe havens for people to post hate speech, and worse – the Buffalo shooting last year was detailed by the perpetrator on a Discord server and seemed to indicate he was searching for a like-minded community.
It gets worse – high-profile conservatives have been leaping to Teixeira’s defence, like Marjorie Taylor Greene who, in a tweet, hailed Jack Teixeira as a national hero because he’s “white, male, christian [sic] and anti-war”, which “makes him an enemy to the Biden regime”. Tucker Carlson, on his Thursday night show, claimed that Teixeira’s arrest was used to cover up a covert, illegal US presence in Ukraine and that the government is treating Teixeira worse than it treated Osama bin Laden.
It’s no coincidence that the most reprehensible right-wing figures of contemporary America are speaking up in support of Teixeira. After all, it’s only okay when they do it – when the draft Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade was leaked in May 2022, Taylor Greene called it “basically like an insurrection of the Supreme Court.”
Right-wing gamer culture, while often depicted as trolling and doxxing, is far more than that. It’s insidious and teaches people that doing things for shock value will net them as much benefit as having good intentions. That’s how the trend of right-wing grifters came about, and that’s how you end up with kids spreading classified documents online for clout. This isn’t fun and games, no matter how much people on the internet like to say ‘it’s not that deep’. It does matter, and we need to be taking steps towards fixing it – not in terms of the government policing Discord servers, but in terms of better content moderation so violent content can be de-platformed. Whether or not tech companies will actually move towards this is another story altogether.