Angry Planet - How a 21-Year-Old Edgelord Stole Pentagon Secrets

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

How is that a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman posted government secrets to a private Discord group for almost a year before anyone noticed? On today’s episode of Angry Planet, Bellingcat’s Aric Toler walks us through the culture that created poster and edgelord Jack Teixeira.Toler also talks about working with The New York Times, dodging phone calls from the FBI, and the digital forensics he used to identify Teixeira. We talk about the Something Awful Forums, 4chan and KiwiFarms, and why Teixeira isn’t a “leaker” at all, he’s a poster.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. I must warn you, audience, I have done little to no preparation for this episode because I've been so deeply invested in the story that we're going to be talking about today. I did some reporting on it, but not nearly as much as our guest. Eric Toller of Bellingcat, also doing some writing for The New York Times. We're going to be talking about the Discord leaks today. Eric, thank you so much for coming on to the show and walking us through this. Sure.

Happy to be on. Thanks for having me. So the first and most important question I have for you is, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Something Awful forums? A long time ago, yeah, when I was, I think when I, I think 2003 or four, I think I had an account. I can't remember exactly when. I remember I got the account when I bought, I was 14 or 15. Hold on. I'm 34 now.

So let me do my reverse math in my head. 2004 minus 1988. 16 then. Okay, right. So I was 16. I remember I bought this computer case from some guy and it broke on its way over. And he couldn't,

he didn't have money to give me a full refund because he'd already spent most of it because he like, he packed it really badly. So he gave me a partial refund and then gifted me an account on something awful forms. It was like his way of like compensating me for his like, his like very poorly packed computer. case. When I built my first computer and I was 16. So yeah, I haven't been on there in years and years and years and years and years. But when I was like 16, I had an account. Yeah. Did you hold on. No, I mean, we're not we don't actually call this the inside baseball podcast. I know we're going to I'm going to explain why this is important. I'm going to get there. And what it is. And what it is. Yes. Oh, fantastic. I'm sorry. I assume there's a segue to something. There's a segue to something here. All right. All right. But audience, keep in your mind.

the Something Awful forums as we move forward in this lovely discussion. So let's do some very basics. Let's back way up. What happened a couple weeks ago in a Discord forum that became national news and led to the arrest of a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman? Yeah. So this guy, we now know, his name is Jack DeShara. He leaked some or posted, I don't know, leak is maybe a big of a strong verb to use for this. He posted a bunch of documents like sensitive, classified, secret, top secret, various forms of classification documents into a private Discord channel.

He was apparently an admin of. We knew about these because they eventually made their way onto Telegram and to a lesser degree, 4chan. In April 5th is when they're posted. And then on the 6th, the following day, New York Times reported that the Pentagon is opening up an investigation into this stuff. There's only at that point seven documents between the 4chanan and telegram that we knew about. But if you kind of trace back eventually to the

ground zero of this tiny little Discord server that Jack was admin of, there were hundreds and hundreds of them posted. And then of those hundreds, like 3,400. Of those 107 them got posted into a larger Discord server that was semi-public at the time. What are we talking about when we talk

about government documents? What's in these? Most of them are pretty boring. So I think I have 80-ish of them. I don't have all of them. I think I have 80-ish of them. A few of them pretty, you know,

pretty fascinating. But they've been, you know, all the juicy stuff has basically been reported already between, you know, the AP,

New York Times, Washington Post, everybody else. So there's stuff about like, there's some signals, intelligence intercepts. Like, there's one about how like,

Masad was like organizing anti-government protests in Israel. So that's obviously pretty, pretty interesting. Stuff about, a lot about different, kind of intrigues around different.

countries shipping arms to Ukraine slash Russia and in the U.S.'s attempt to either facilitate or disrupt that. And a lot of stuff about the war in Ukraine in particular, like tactical information around like, you know, movements in Bakhmut and Kharkiv and Hirsson and, you know, the South, you know, by Crimea and stuff like that. Like, Amel replenishment schedules, you know, a lot of stuff that is interesting if you're like, you know, Rob Lee or Michael Kaufman, like the guys who do like this like intense analysis of the war. But for the vast majority of people on Earth, they don't really, They don't really care that much. It's kind of a tactical strategic information.

And also a lot of stuff that's just like basically already known, like basically just like reporting media reports of like that is, if you just Google, you'd find the exact same information that's in a lot of these documents. I just wanted to know how up to date current these documents are. I mean, are they last weeks, you know, were they hot off the press when everybody found them or what? Yeah. So the most recent document, I think, is from March 1st. And so I think they go back from to October, I think it's the first ones that were, that were put in the discourse server. And almost all the ones that we have seen have been like revealed in documents and all in reporting mostly from February and March. Because the last public leak of these documents was was on March 1st and 2nd.

And that's the most recent documents. And there's nothing as I haven't seen anything that that post dates March 1st. And what? And this was initially he was hand-transcribing things and taking photographs of them, right? Yeah, he, when he first started posting these in October and his private Discord channel with his buddies, like this like 20, 30 active members in the group, he was handwriting them like half an hour per document. He's like writing, writing, writing, writing. But his audience is mostly just like a bunch of like teenagers on Discord. So they didn't like have, they just want a TLDR of it.

They didn't want to read the whole thing because there's like a big wall of text. And after a couple months, I think in December. of January, he got annoyed with the other people on the server because they weren't paying attention to his, you know, highly classified documents he was transcribing. And then he just started posting the, like, photos of them because, you know, the photos are easier to read. There's like little graphics and maps and easy to follow and his little bit more, uh, consumable for his audience. I guess you could say. Do you know what, did you know what discord was, Jason before this? Thanks to you, Matthew. I actually did know what discord was. Uh, but, uh, do you think it'd be. You know what discord was? Uh, but, uh, do you think it'd be. useful to explain. Oh, I do. I do. I was just curious. Like, I assume, are your kids in it? I assume that they've, like, they have gaming groups in Discord, right? I actually have kids who go out and play. Oh, that's weird. It's actually quite disappointing. Weird. They're on sports teams and play frisbee, stuff like that.

What you tell us? And you needed, but. Were you on Discord other than for Eric, like, I know Bellingcat has one where they do various things. Um, but like, socially, were you on Discord or are you a Discord user beyond your use of it in work? I've booked around it before. I'm not one generation too old. So I'm 34. So I'm about one generation too old for this. Most of my friends, when we play games, we just like do it over the endgame chat or like, you know, something separate.

I think I think one time I did use Discord to play because I was playing with a couple of my colleagues at Bell and cat. And we're trying to figure out a way to like, I think we're playing warzone. I call it duty war zone. We're trying to figure out. I think Discord is the easiest way to do like a continuous. Because I think one of us was on PC. one of us is on Xbox, one is we're doing crossplay.

But outside of like that one or two times, no, I think I remember playing with like Roger Wilco a long time ago, which is like this ancient voice app. Yeah, I was playing some games like high school or early college. But that was a very long time ago. So I'm not one, I'm the Roger Wilcoe generation, not the Discord generation. It's funny because I'm 39. And maybe it's just because I'm like a gamer and I'm so plugged into the gaming space.

I'm like, I'm on Discord all the time. I've got like a couple of private Discord servers that I'm a part of where memes are posted and we gather to play video games. And it is because so it's like a pseudo. Yeah, it's easy. It's a pseudo private server that you set up. And like usually it's kind of run by the community. So there's one or two people that run it that are part of the group. And you can create different channels within it.

And you can create different voice channels. And it was initially marketed as this thing. where gamers get together and you can coordinate your group and everyone can get on the same voice channel. A lot of games now, they've got their own voice channels, but for a long time, if you were playing World of Warcraft, say, World of Warcraft did not have in-game voice chat. And getting a big group together to take down bosses as a complicated process. It was easier for people to talk to each other. And there was a whole bunch of different services that attempted to kind of fill that niche. and discord seems to have been the one that won.

Now a lot of, it's funny, there is a lot of military stuff that also happens on there. Ukraine is actually using it to coordinate, to coordinate active military operations, which I think is really bizarre. The U.S. Army and the Air Force e-sports teams have their own Discord servers. So it was like a known property, but it's also a place where you can just set up a community to show off to a bunch of teenagers, apparently. So yeah, that's what kind of Discord is. I liked that you said Jack was

posting that these weren't leaks. I think that's the right vera. Because that's what this is. It was not, it has the energy of someone going on to Twitter and showing off, right? This was not someone that was trying to show. Or Twitter group DMs and showing off. Yeah, Twitter groups DMs. Yeah, yeah.

Can you tell me a little bit more about him And like what the motivation here was if there was any like how did this group start? Yeah. So the group group charted a few years ago, I think in 2019, 2020. I remember the exact year. I think I'm having 2020. And they were all, not all of them, but most of the members were on a different discord of a guy named Oxide, who is a popular YouTube like gear guy, like military kit gear guy.

So this guy has like 100, 200,000 followers on YouTube. He posts like, can this bullet penetrates this helmet, right? or I don't know. It's not my world. I'm not into this military stuff, but like, apparently people who are into like kit and gear and all that stuff are really, he's pretty popular in that world. So they were on his server and they got banned for a few different reasons. Like some of them were little too racist. Some of them were posting memes. I got that annoyed the admin. They got banned for various reasons. And so they just made their own server. And that was this server called Thug Shaker Central, which is the name of one of the servers or one of the memes they were posting. Thug Shaker is like some meme. like a black guy like shaking his butt or something like that. I don't know. I've just looked at the Urban Dictionary word. And they would, they would basically do this kind of like a Rick rolling thing

where they would do like bait and switch to where they would send someone a link and they think they're going to see something interesting. And they click and they see a guy shaking his butt like in your face, right? That's kind of a, it's like a brick rolling, but with, but with that kind of twist. Anyways, they were posting that too much, apparently on this oxide server so they got banned. So they made their own.

And then there are a bunch of admins. I mean, Jack, I've heard a few different accounts from a few different people who are on the server. But one person told me Jack was, you know, I mean, the guy who interviewed the Washington Post, who I talked to said, you know, Jack was the unquestioned leader of the server. You know, they're trying to make us all better people, all that. I talked to other people who told me like, no, he was a server because he just happened to remake it after we got banned. And he was his server. He was admin by default, right?

And a lot of people were annoyed by him and didn't, like, he wasn't an unquestioned leader. He wasn't a cult. You know, some people might have looked up to him, but a lot of people, you know, it is a Discord server, not a cult, right? It's a kind of a loosey-goose collection of guys who want to, mostly guys who want to, you know, play projects on Boyd or Arma-3 together, and he's using it kind of as a collection point for it. So, yeah. It made it sound like a Christian fundamentalist, you know, like Catholic this. They made it sound so organized in the New York Times.

And you're just saying that's total crap. Well, the Washington Post had a bit more. So I think in the New York Times story, they mentioned that one person described, as such. We're not completely sure if these descriptions were correct. The Washington posted an interview with this guy. He goes by Vaki. He's his pseudonym. He's a kid. He's 17. I believe he's 17. He's a minor. And he was friends with Jack. And the way he described it is that. I mean, I think the Times, the way they report is like this is what he described it as. It's a cold hard fact. But he did this like, you know, this dramatic like 48

hours style interview like in hotel room. They blurt. They like blacked out his face, you know, with the Washington Post where he talked about how, you know, we were a family and, and, you know, we all love each other. And he was our leader. And he's so strong and charismatic and blah, blah, blah. And that's what he presented it, like, as it was basically, as you say, like an Orthodox cult. Like, I think they were all Orthodox Christians or like, that's how I described it.

But I've talked to some other people and they told me, like, oh, there are like four people who were Orthodox. The others were LARPing, you know, they were just kind of curious about it. So I think it was a bit more of a heterodox group than maybe, maybe, again, the whole server as a whole, I think, was relatively heterodox. I mean, you know, they're all like, you know, young gamers and a lot of them are probably racist. But I think that maybe

people who are specifically posting, there's a specific channel where they're posting these leaks. So Jack was posting this in the specific channel within the server. Maybe the people who were active in that channel were a bit more homogenous, right? With like the Orthodox, looked up to Jack, that sort of thing. But the server in general with like the 20 active

and 30 or so inactive members, I think it was a little bit more, a little bit less homogenous of this makeup. I think this is this is so important to me as part of the story and this is why I asked you about the something awful forums because you know you and I were talking on what the seventh

I think where I bullied you into telling me how you've gotten from Telegram to Discord and like because you'd posted something where you'd figured out where it had come from before it made it onto Telegram and Twitter and you were like this is the stupidest thing you've ever heard my immediate thought was like okay so it's war thunder forums yeah everyone's first guess yeah yeah so like i'm talking to you and you're uh you eventually tell me there was like a Minecraft

discord server um and like traced it back and like when i started seeing the kind of people in discord that were posting and like what these communities were like i instantly knew the kind like i knew what this guy was going to be like before we found him um he was going to be like a something awful forum poster circa 1999 to 2006. That energy, not that specific kind of person. A banned something awful poster.

A banned something awful poster. Someone who went to Kiwi Farms afterwards. Yeah, somebody who went to Kiwi Farms or 4chan. Like, just this kind of anarchic shit posting, edge lord, probably lonely, creeps out the people in his real life. The kind of guy that, I had a friend like this when I was growing up,

who would mail order books about how to be a ninja and buy Shurukins at the mall. And Mall Ninja Kid and yell at people online about like the specifics of sites on different rifles. And was like vaguely racist, like posting edgy memes that that were attention grabbing racist. Yeah, attention grabbing versus like actually racist. Well, I mean, it's still racist. Ironic racism. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's different shades. Yeah. But like a shit poster. Like that's, and it's wild to me because we're talking about, I think, in some total, 300, 300, 300. I know you said you've seen 84. Mm-hmm. Or 80-ish, 80 or so there were 100. Yeah.

So the numbers of them are three, four-ish hundred were posted in the, in the Thug Shaker, the original server. Of those, 107 were posted into a larger. server and then a majority of those I've been seen by, because these were deleted pretty quickly after they're discovered. I don't think they've all been recovered. But the majority of those have been seen by journalists and analysts and all that. So in the wake of this, it's a big leak, it's a gigantic leak. And I want to get into how that all happened here in a second.

But like as a process and journalism observation and the question for you, I've noticed in the wake of this, everyone kind of projecting their own thoughts about Jack onto him. So we've got like the kind of the more mainstream side of the New York Times, the Washington Post. So my own colleague's advice have written about it this way where this was like a red-pilled magick Judd kid, you know, kind of ideologically driven and like he had this cult of personality with the four dudes in the one subsection of the Thugsaber Central Channel. And then the other side, I'm seeing like this, this kind of intercept Matt Taibi, Glenn Greenwald view where he is, you know, a brave leaker sharing secrets about the American war machine and was anti-war. Like, there's even less indication that that is true based on like his posts and what we know.

Why do you think, why do you think that these narratives have erupted around this kid? Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of a Rorschach, Rorschach, whatever. You know, some German word I can't say. Rorschach. Right? Worsak. The only reason I know is because of Watchmen.

There you go. Okay, Ror Sack tests. Yeah. So you see what you want to see right with him. So, I mean, you look at just like just the raw data. You don't really like read into it too much of like what he actually did and what his closest friends slash online confidants or whatever you said. It's clear he never meant for these to be public, right?

So he was posting these for a very, very small audience. He never meant for them to get outside that very, very small audience. And he was trying to like inform them one way or another. So maybe he wanted to make them better people or whatever, this small group. Or maybe he wanted to inform them, but it just like Chase Cloud, right? I mean, that's just getting to being a bit of a psychologist, but why you did it. But he did do it, but he never did it with the intention of this spreading elsewhere. If he, I mean, if, if, if he actually went to, for example, DDoS secrets.

So DDoS secrets is kind of the, I know, the spiritual successor to WikiLeaks, right? Because WikiLeaks, you came and submit stuff to their and anymore. Like, there's a mission pages down. It's like basically dead. DDoS Secrets is some former Wikileaks people who made their own site. And they publish a bunch of very, very spicy stuff, like leaks from, you know, police departments, things like that that have got them banned from Twitter. If he had gone to DDoS secrets and said,

I have these sensitive documents, I'd like to publish them, I'd like the world to see them to expose the, you know, the American Empire and all that stuff, it's a totally different story at that point. Then he's a whistleblower. Then he's trying to inform the public. then he's basically what Taibi and Greenwald and all them are saying is basically true at that point if that was what he was doing. And I think, you know, and if he had done that, I think, you know, I wish he had in a lot of ways because there's a lot of these documents I think that are, have very interesting information. I'm glad they're out there in the world's a better place because a lot of these documents are out there. There's a lot of stuff that didn't need to be out there.

Like, you know, the ammo replenishment schedule for Ukraine over specific types of anti-aircraft missiles. Like, again, like that's the world's not a better place. Who cares, right? unless you're a military analyst, like, that's not really, you know, you're not revealing a great truth about the geopolitical intrigues of photography. So I'm not going to try it when you do that. But, you know, I wish he had done something like that because then he's to be out there and he would have, legal protections and all that stuff. But he didn't. He just posted them for his tiny little group of friends on Discord to share. And then one of, then, you know, three or sorry, five or six months

later, one of his friends took a portion of these and put him on a larger Discord and then all the, you know, house of cars came crashing down. So, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, if he, what does he say? Like, if something was, you know, if something completely opposite was true, then that would be true. But that's not what happened, right? He wasn't a whistleblower. He didn't do anything that a whistleblower would do. He just posts these documents for his buddies in a small group chat without the intention of the world saying them.

So it's kind of like fan fiction, I guess, right? If I'm trying to make this guy into a whistleblower. I wish he had been a whistleblower. I wish he had put these out for DDoS seekers or someone else to publish, but he didn't. There's also something I want to make really clear here because there's been another piece of this narrative that's been that's developed on that Glenn Green Wall, Matt Taibi intercepting side. They've reached out to me for comment. Intercept did and I did not talk to them about the stupid RPG story. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was like there's two paragraphs about my stupid character sheet in your thing about anyway, that you help.

the FBI catch this guy and I want to be clear he was paying for Discord with his credit card with his credit card with his name on it Discord was going to

turn that information over right and they did the day before he was yeah you did not help the FBI identify this person

and in fact they did call you and how did that interaction go yeah so I guess again so the accusation a lot of people said is that like you know we're working

It's a handmade into the security state, and we gave them information, all that stuff, which isn't quite true. I'll talk about my very brief, very unremarkable brush with the FBI in just a second. So the timeline of how this happened, I mean, we now know because there's charging documents that have been released, and it gives a timeline of how the FBI learned about who Jack was, and it's on the 10th. So April 10th is when they talked to, I'm pretty sure they talked to Luca, who's the kid who, the 17-year-old kid who posted these documents onto the larger Discord channel. They visited him, they talked to him, and they basically got Jack's identity through him. And then they sent in a request through Discord, and they found that that Jack had been paying. I think he paid for Nitro, right?

The Nitro boost, right? You can do with their Discord, which is like kind of this useless little boost you can do for a server. Hey, you know, well, maybe. Maybe not useless. Okay. It's more useful than like Reddit Karma or something like that, right? But, yeah. It is.

It opens, like, extra features, right? It opens some more functionality, allows you to stream at higher bit rates. some of us paid and are, you know, are paying, or there's uses. Okay. Well, I don't want a nitro shame anyone, yeah.

But so he paid, he one way or another, he put his credit card information. I think it's the only thing you can pay for in Discord is there's, I don't think there's any other internet. So it had to be that unless there's some secret, you know, Discord store I don't know about,

but he put in his information with his home address, his name and everything. So it's like, you know, do you know this guy ran the server? You know, just, it takes,

30 seconds to search words. You had access to Discord logs, right? And they knew this, and they got the request back from Discord and the 12th. And so we, uh, the New York Times published their story naming him the 13th. And what happened, um, was, um, my, my temporary colleague, Haley, who was working in the story, um, after we kind of got an idea that, that this guy, Jack may be, um, we didn't know if he was a leak or not. We just thought he was just a guy on the thug shaker server. Like we did it, you know, when we first, we were just trying to find other documents. That was, because we posted a story on the 13th, the same day that we identified,

and we also posted stories of new information from new leaks, leaked documents we got. So we were really just chasing league documents. And getting to get those leaked documents, we were chasing people on the server to talk to him. And one of the people that we identified was turned out to Big Jack. And Haley drove to rural Massachusetts from New York. I think she left at four in the morning to go drive to her, to his house. And when they got there, they, she realized very quick, like, oh, wait, hold on, this guy's under surveillance because they're like FBI van, like clearly FBI vans.

drive my like 15, 30 minute intervals across his parents' house. And she saw a surveillance plane that was not on any flight radar service. That was flying, like, circling overhead. So I was like, okay, clearly, you know, things going on here. And then soon after, some of the FBI, like, called in New York Times, someone to, like, back off, like, they're going to, like, you guys need to get out of here. It's not safe. You know, clearly they were prepared to do a raid, right?

Right. So they walked into the FBI about to already arrest him. So, like, it was, we walked into it. It was about to already happen. And if anything, it accelerated their timeline because they probably, they were surveilling him clearly. They had been surveilling them for at least a day or two at those point. So they were probably, who knows, they were trying to find out there's more to the story about this guy. Like if he was communicating with person X, Y, Z, or if he had more documents or whatever.

So if anything, it's kind of adversarial to what the FBI was doing because it spent their timeline up. Anyway, so, but that was the story about the day of the publication. So they knew they were about to braid up already, before we even identified or even thought about this guy. They already knew who he was and they were about to arrest him. So I thought. And then the FBI called me on the 10th. So this is February 10th. So the same day that they interviewed this Luca kid and find out about Jack, they called me.

I was at the zoo with my kid at the time. I got a call. And I was waiting for a call from a different journalist. And I, when I was, it was like 9.30 is the call. I don't remember what the time it was. And I was expecting to call at 930. Like 930 sharp, I get a call on my phone. And it's 816 area code.

I live in Kansas City. And I would answer the phone like, oh, I didn't know you were local. I didn't know you were from Kansas City. in the person response, how does this special election so-and-so with the FBI at the Kansas City branch? I'm like, oh, okay, you're not who I was expecting to call me. And basically they wanted to meet. And I was like, can I, you know, I was like,

I don't know. Like, I don't think I should do that because, can I talk to our lawyer about that. And they're like, yeah, you can. But like, what's the time you could meet though if you can meet? And I'm like, I was like, what's the latest possible time? Because I was scared this is a voluntary thing. I was going to become a volunteer thing, right? There's going to become involuntary thing.

So I was like, what's the time? the latest? I was like, what's the latest I could think of? I was like, this is Monday morning. Like, I don't know, Friday afternoon. I thought it was latest I possibly could. I got, when I got home, I emailed our lawyer at Ballancat and they're like, you can, you can just say no. So I just referred him to the lawyer. The lawyer said no. The Justice Department lawyer also called the lawyer and they wanted to talk and then the next day and then we said no again. And that was that. And that was the end of it. So that was a very brief uneventful brush, but, um, I don't know. But we're

talking about a second. It's not worthy enough to chat about at least. You're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be right back. And we're back with more of your favorite show, Angry Planet. What expectation do you think this guy, Jack, should have had of privacy? I mean, as you pointed out, he was not really a leaker. He posted videos of himself in the Discord. So it just sort of interesting. thing unlike does the journalistic ethos of never revealing

a source count when your source not only has no expectation of privacy but not it but isn't asking for it he said don't share this shit of course yeah it's uh I'm sure he probably told people don't share this least once or I'm going to get go to jail

I assume he told this his audience that at least once. Yeah, I don't know. He wasn't our source, though. I mean, the first time the New York Times talked to him when he would have been knocked on the door after we thought we identified him. So it's not like he was a secret source that was then outed, right? It doesn't kind of work on that spectrum. But, I mean, like, when the New York Times went to, we weren't going to, like, out him.

The idea is we want to talk to him because, like, this is the guy who's responsible for the biggest tranche of, you know, classified documents coming out since Snowden. So, like, obviously, that's a story, right? Yeah. We figure out who this guy is, like, obviously, it would be a journalist, like, malpractice and not even attempt to talk to him. And so the idea to talk to, I mean, they had all these stories like different scenarios planned out like, okay, talk to him. What if he says X? What if he says Y? What if he says Z?

Like, what if the FBI arrest him? What if the FBI is already there? What if he has a gun? You know, who knows? Right? Because this guy had apparently his big gun enthusiasts. So like maybe he like felt the wall was closing in. Like, who knows what's going to happen, right?

And the idea, like our best case scenarios, like, we could talk to him and he wants to talk about why he did this and all that. You know, and then maybe have more documents, right? And then at that point, it becomes a different story. If this guy has more documents he wants to share, right? then all the captiles of everything changes. But, yeah, so the New York Times reporter went to the door, then knocked the door, they talked to the step-parents, and eventually Jack came home in a pickup truck,

and he just basically said, like, I don't think of my lawyer, right, to my lawyer, right? And that was basically the end as far as talking to him goes, because he knew that the feds were closing in at that point, because he could see the cars traveling by, he could see the plane overhead, you know, at that point he knew. Do we have any idea? He shut down the discord. He shut down Thug Shoe. Shaker Central

on the seventh, on the first New York Times story. The six or the seven. The six or the seven. Yeah. So the channel itself, so the channel with the content

and it was shut, that was deleted from the server on the fifth of the six. I can't remember exactly when. And then, but the server itself, they shut down, I think,

on the seventh. The day after the story. So is the, the assumption then that he saw the, he saw his docs like hitting telegram and Twitter and was like, no shit. I've got to start cleaning up.

Yeah. And in the charging documents, you could see that, on either the seventh or the eighth. I can't remember exactly when he went to his work computer where he could search for like internal alerts and bulletins. And he searched the word leak to find out if there was like an internal investigation going on from his work login and his work computer,

which is the day after the New York Times published is about the leak. So that's about the worst thing you possibly care. It's so funny. Like there's so much of this that's so absurd and so funny. There's so much of the, a lot of the stuff that's in those documents is deadly serious, obviously. but it's just like that it's this that it's this kind of person that that is responsible for this one in charge yeah yeah i mean who else would it be though right yeah i mean let's let's talk about that uh who like what was his job yeah so he worked um it was like a cyber i don't even

know what this is but like a cyber transport specialist is that his title something like that yeah i don't a journeyman journeyman hold on okay even better not not not Yeah, he's a step up from apprentice, right? And he, and the Air National Guard. So he worked on a base, I think, on Cape Cod or near Cape Cod through the International Guard. And apparently this is a pretty, the Air National Guard, I didn't know all about this before. I've learned quickly that they do a ton of intelligence work, especially around like the war in Ukraine. Like one of the leaked documents was actually that I was looking through is like a, we're going to be published an article about this before too long.

about an assessment of a BDA is like a bomb damage assessment or whatever on a Ukrainian strike using some U.S. weapons. So like whenever the U.S. weapons are used, they like apparently did do assessments on like how they worked and like what worked and what doesn't. And the assessment was produced by the 176 intelligence squadron in North Dakota, which is an Air National Guard unit in Fargo, North Dakota. So like, you know, some of the intelligence assessments and stuff are being done by the Air National Guard. So I guess it's not a huge leap of logic for Jack, who was part of the intelligence squadron, an intelligence wing or whatever at the Cape Cod base to have access to these documents. He was a cyber defense operations journeyman, and it's the 102nd, which had until a few days ago when the Air Force pulled it an intelligence mission. And it sounds like kind of just reading through their website and like the documents about it, it's they were. he was perhaps probably an IT specialist and they were just kind of processing data.

It's getting massive amounts of data and like sorting it and looking over it essentially, right? Yeah. And I understand that they were like helping for, I think they were preparing some like some documents for like higher level people. Right. They were part of the like the filtration process between, you know, the raw intelligence data and getting stuff for like, you know, Miley and the, you know, chairman of staff or joint staff or whatever called. So, like, a lot of the stuff that was being, like, processed into, like, more, like, you know, easy readable stuff. He was part of that, like, link, one of the link of the chain of that process. Do we know how he got the stuff out? I mean, in the movies, it would be a USB drive that. Yeah, yeah.

He's physically printed. And that's everything was just printed. I, yeah. I mean, he had, I mean, he, we know he folded it into quarters, right? So, like, two folds, right? Horizont vertical. And I don't know how maybe he's put in his back. I mean, literally, just made he's put in his back.

his back pocket and walked out. I don't know. Because that's in tight security we've got there. Right. In the photographs, I think it's pretty important to say, there's a lot of stuff in the background, and it's pretty obvious that it's... It's in his house. It's in his house. Yeah. Like, there's a gamer keyboard in the background of one of them. There's like a...

There's a tablet of some kind with a cracked screen, guerrilla glue. It took one of his kitchen counter, too. That's how you figured out who it was, right? The kitchen counter thing. At least that was a strong indication of it. I mean, because, like, you know, these kitchen counters, like, have identical like designs, I'm pretty sure. They're like, you know, main in China or whatever, and they kind of all look the same.

But it, you know, that was a strong indication that he might have been the guy, but that in correspondence with all the other stuff, right? So the, yeah, this is a whole long process talk about identifying him. But in short, basically, we had a profile of a guy who, who we know who was part of the intelligence squadron and the Air National Guard. And in the background of one of these documents was a kitchen counter with the white tile floor below it and kind of the speckles on the granite countertop matched up between family photos on social media of the same house where he was visible.

Some of this was on his Steam profile. Is that right? Yeah, that's how he found him. That's also so good. It's all Steam. It's all Steam. Yeah, it's all Steam. So there's a, there's a site called SteamID.uk. It's a site that scrapes content from Steam.

So like friend list, groups, screenshots, you know, all this stuff that you do. Because for those who don't know, Steam is a gaming platform. I've been around since 2004, I think, right? It's when Half Life 2, it's when Half Life 2 launch. I got my account is 19 years old because I got it on launch day. I fly 2. So I've had it for that long. So it's been around for a while.

And it's kind of like it has two functions, right? You can buy games on there. So it's like the same thing. You like buy game like the PlayStation store, the Xbox Microsoft store or whatever. And the secondary is like the social feature, right? You can add friends. And so if you meet somebody playing Counterstrike global operations and you can play, you know, Arm of 3 with them.

So like if you meet someone in one game, you can play in a different game. It's kind of like a similar. a one shop stop for like PC gaming social, you know, buying the games, playing them and meeting your friends. And we knew, I knew a handful of guys who were on the server, this tiny little Discord server with, you know, 20 active members. And I've talked to, I knew three of their Steam IDs. And so it was just kind of a basic, you know, I just go on to the site, seam ID. com, export the friends list of these three people and find the corresponding who, you know, who is a common friend with all three of them, right? Got a list of six, seven people and then just kind of go through them one by one.

And of these six, seven people, there's one, a guy named Silhouette was his, was his stina handle. He had a profile photo of Roman Raines, I noticed the wrestler. I noticed that right away. And I looked through his kind of historic data. And I see he was going to friends. He had a bunch of military stuff. And I did an interview with one of these guys, the 17-year-old kid who was friends with Jack. And the kid mentioned that he played a lot of Armathry, Zamboyd.

and I think CounterStrike and CSGO with Jack. And so I checked and he had a lot of screenshots and a lot of play activity time in those three games. And I was like, oh, well, you know, it's a strong candidate to be the guy. We looked more into kind of tracing his use, because he had a few historic usernames on there because aside steam ID. UK, if you change your name, it's still retained in like historic data. We looked, kind of, you know, did some digital footprint tracing with his other IDs, which led us back to his real ID. And also helped that in one of the games, that Arma 3, his username and one of the screenshots he posted was J. to share so that helped

that helped a lot to figure who he was. Earlier you said of course it was going to be a guy like this. And we've talked about it a little bit. Can you kind of elaborate on that? It feels like there was there was this time and maybe you and I are kind of of of this era where you had to be a little tech savvy to get online, learn how to use all this stuff.

The user interfaces, everything's become so easy now. It feels like the knowledge of the digital spaces has diminished a bit. The knowledge of how to hide yourself and not like post personal cringe online has diminished a little bit. What do you think is going on here that a 21-year-old National Guardsman gets access to this kind of stuff and doesn't know better than to not fucking post it in a way that's going to get him caught? I mean, I kind of understand that. I mean, it was dumb, obviously. It was not saying, right? But, like, it was kind of an intimate setting for him because, like, everyone keeps on

going like, oh, it's a Discord chat, Discord chat. But, like, think of it in different terms. Think of it as, like, a WhatsApp group, right? Think of it as, like, a private WhatsApp or Signal group or something like that. It's a group chat. It's a group chat. Yeah. Instead of thinking it as, like, a Discord channel, because discourse can be public or private,

think of it as a group chat, because this is basically, like, a slightly more structured, you know, it's like the vibes of IRC, but with the structure of Slack is kind of how it's set up, right? So, again, it was kind of a more. intimate setting. And even within the channel that he was posting in, was smaller than the bigger group because not everyone in the channel was, and the server was active in the channel, because the channel is a subset of the, of the server. So maybe he just felt that it was just a bit more of like a small intimate group and like, you know, my friends won't betray me or be stupid enough

to post this. But again, he was posting a bunch of 17-year-olds, right? So like, he probably should have seen coming. So, yeah, I think, and also Discord is a very kind of anonymous-ish kind of thing. Like you can like, you know, on your discord account, you can like link like, this is my Steam account. This is my Twitter account, all that. But like a lot of people don't do that, obviously. And I don't know. It's, it's your, I kind of understand, at least, you know, as much as I can get into the mind of a 21 year old with it who's doing this. Um, of, you know, you're talking to people on voice chat all the time. It's a much more intimate setting. Right. It's not, it's a little bit more like, I like the paris social relationships. You've

filled with someone on Steam or a little bit or on Discord or different than elsewhere because you're on voice chat all the time. And you're playing games hours and hours and hours every not, you're playing games on voice chat and talking to these people. It's a little bit different than just like your followers on Twitter or Instagram, where it's a lot more distant, right? Even if you're on group chat, it's a little more distant compared to like being a literal voice chat, like group party phone calls, you know, for hours and hours like almost every night, the relationships are a little bit tighter, right?

A little bit more, or at least they perceive them, it'd be a bit tighter than if you you were just, you know, your followers on Twitter or whatever. That makes so much sense to me. And when you talk about this setting being sort of smaller, I wonder, you know, would Jack Decher actually want this stuff to have gotten out? Would, you know, how would he feel about the Russians reading it? Would he felt like he betrayed his country or I'm just, you know, trying to, I mean, I'm just trying to think about how stupid he is. Because I mean, we sort of agree that he's stupid. I mean, how smart were you when you were 21?

smarter than this, slightly, but smarter than this. Yeah, I don't know, honestly. It's like, I don't want to read too much what his like personal politics were because there's been, I mean, who knows how even stable those were, right? Between year to year, month, month. Because we may find him posting, you know, something when he was 18 and it may completely change his mind by time he 20 and then again when he's 21, right? Because when you're that age, you change your mind a lot, right?

So I don't want to read too much of what his politics were. But from what I have heard from people who knew him in real life, like his time in high school, is he wasn't a very pleasant person to be around, and he was not terribly, didn't have very good social skills in real life, as I'm saying. He definitely wasn't the most, I don't know,

didn't have the most egalitarian social views towards race and things like that. My very, like, PC way of describing it. So, I mean, I don't think he was probably a terribly pleasant person with, like, his, you know, social views. But I don't know how he felt about Russia. Like, I don't know. Maybe he hated Russia.

Maybe he loved Russia. I don't know. It's kind of, I can't really say about that. I mean, we do know that they had a data subchannel in that group called, what was it, Bear versus Pig? Yeah, that was the channel where he's posting all the documents. And I brought this up with one of the members, and he was very quick, like, but it wasn't to make fun of Ukraine, I promise. And they said, Bear was Russia, it's obvious, right? And Pig was supposed to Ukraine, but he kept on, I got, I should check this.

I've mentioned in a few interviews. I should probably actually check it. But he said that it's some meme about some Ukrainian soldier yelling something about a pig. And so, like, it was like an end joke on the server about this. They all liked this meme. Yes, but it is like a pretty... It's a pretty well, and it's a pretty anti-Ukrainian meme. I remember...

Is it? Okay. It is. Like, there was a controversy around the video game. Atomic Heart that came out a couple months ago, which has... It's developed Russia, full Russian developers. There are pigs in the game. What game is called? Atomic Heart.

Atomic Heart. Atomic Heart. Yeah. There are pigs in the game, and when you attack them with a melee weapon, it leaves a Z on them. Okay. Yeah. So there's like, it's definitely a, it's an anti-Ukrainian. I don't know for the same meme, because the guy telling me, it was some Ukrainian soldier who saw something, saw a pig and start saying something.

Yeah, is what you got described to this. It is, but it's like, pig is kind of like linked. It's, if you're ever, you're saying pig, it's kind of linked into, but anyway, that's not a tangent. The person claimed it wasn't an anti-Ukraine thing. It was just like a joke they had. But again, I don't know. That's what I was told. But I mean, I think that about the thug shaker meme isn't racist either, right?

They're 17. They would say. But they're 17-year-olds. But they're 17-year-olds. Yeah. I forget Tucker Carlson is actually pro-Russia too. So it's not like there isn't the massive fifth column in this country anyway. Sorry.

I write about this shit. And I guess my views are pretty well known. I mean, you're right. You are an opinion editor, so. I am an opinion editor, it's true. I do want to ask a couple more questions before we let you go. So it seems like, especially in the initial wake of this news coming out, the Pentagon was caught pretty flat-footed here.

There was a lot of like, oh, kind of like in a press conference. I remember saying those, yeah, it seemed a little confused. Yeah, they're just like confused and like we're going to have to change the way we do things. do you get a sense that they all learned what I mean it's hard because we don't know what the hell's going on but like I guess my question is what do you do about this if you're the Pentagon? I mean, what can you do? Because I mean, again, you could substitute the word discord for WhatsApp group chat or Slack or Signal or anything else. It's the exact same story.

I think that I'm absolutely sure that similar documents have been shared on WhatsApp group chats and Sigma chat and Slack chats and every other chat you can imagine over the last few years. It's just the recipients for this haven't been 17-year-old kids who are posting on Discord, right? So, I mean, it's not like this is the first or last time there's, you know, secret documents are going to be posted in a group shot. It's going to happen and has happened. It will continue to happen.

This is obviously an extreme example because someone was saving them over time and then posted them in for everyone to see. And, yeah, but I think maybe the question, I mean, I'm not an expert. You guys maybe know more about this, like the whole Natsac thing, but like how many people have access to this information is also kind of insane to me? I was kind of learning about that. Well, it's funny because I bet it's higher than the reported numbers because the last,

the last report was 2017, supposed to be an annual report. I think the DNI does it. And the last time they did it, they found that there are, so 1.3 million with top secret clearance, and around 3 million total with clearance in general. Yeah, so that's like 1% of the country, right? And I'm, and I'm, and I, so that'll work out. And because it's, it's been so long since we've had that report, I am, I, there's more. There's got to be more.

Yeah. So maybe that's the problem. If you have that many people with that much information, you're going to have at least one racist, 21 year old posting stuff, right? Yeah, of course. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's an interesting part of this too, is like who gets clearance and why and how does it happen. And it's funny because.

Like the clearance, how the way the clearance process works, in some ways it's easier. Because there are, there is like a contingent of zoomers that their social media presence is steam, steam profiles and discord. Things that like you aren't going to check if you're doing clearances. They don't have Instagrams. They don't have Facebooks. They don't have Twitter accounts. Or if they do, they're extremely anonymous or like finstas. And like the person doing the clearance is like not going to know to look for those things.

Yeah. So if you're a 21 year old and you don't have much digital. history online. You don't have much personal history. You're probably not in massive debt, which is another red flag they look for. It's easy to get top secret clearance. If they're looking for baseline IT workers that they need to give this clearance to be able to sort data, you are going to get some weirdos, right? Yeah. And a lot of the, I don't know what the screening processes, but I imagine the thing they're screening for is, as you're saying, more like stable, permanent social media presences, right? So like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, which are like, which would be sanitized. as well, too. It's like, it's very Jungian, right? You wear different masks, different parts of the parts of the internet, depending on where you are, right? So you're linked, you know, it's like the meme of like me on LinkedIn, me on Twitter, me on Instagram, right? But a lot of the things that are, I guess, would be seen as, again, I don't know the processes, but think, but you seen as like higher risk would be more fleeting types of things. So like 4chan, right? It's literally anonymous,

right? And, you know, no, you probably don't even use a trip code. And if you did, you know, it's not something you can discover. All you see a little flag by your avi and that's it, right? Yep. So things like 4chan and Akun, which would be seen as like higher risk, I guess you can say. And then Discord, which again is like it's, you know, you could have my, I could give you my Discord ID, but you can't see anything. Like if I gave you my Discord, it's not like you can see a list channels that I'm in. There are servers I'm in. It doesn't work like that, especially private ones.

So yeah, I mean, it's like, for example, like, you know, I guess the early 2000s equivalent would be is like, I'm in all these, I'm active in these IRC rooms, right? Which is like, it's not really something you can search for. You can't search a public record of IRC chess. It doesn't work like that. So this is, I guess, maybe a continual problem. Not, you know, I guess the equivalent to that would be like, I don't know, going back to the internet archaeology, right? You know, looking through all my Usenet posts versus my IRC chats, you know, I guess it would be

the 90s and the 90s version of this. So now I'm imagining, watch this. Now watch this, Jason. I'm very happy with this. Now I'm imagining a world where, you know, you're going in for your security clearance and you sit down and the interviewer sits across from you and says, all right, sir or madam, are you now or have you ever been a member of the something awful forums?

I've actually heard someone has told me before that there are some places. I think they vehemently denied this, but apparently Lockheed Barton or some Booz Allen Hamilton, one of these security contractors, actually asked their applicants that they have War Thunder accounts or if they've been active on War Thunder before. Yes. I remember hearing that story. I've had someone tell me. I've had someone tell me who applied. They actually were asked that once during an interview. So I have very anecdotal evidence that that apparently is true. Again, please do not sue me. I didn't even name the company. I don't know what it is.

But I have anecdotal evidence of someone of hearsay. I'm putting like three or four different degrees about this. Someone told me that this is true. I've heard the same hearsay. Do you know, Jason, do you know about War Thunder? Do you know why? This is also very funny. Okay. So it's a video game where, like, people fight tanks, essentially. Very realistic. Very realistic simulation game. I think three, is it three times now, Eric, that this has happened?

Ten times. It's ten times? I thought it was three. I checked the Wikipedia page. There have been ten instances. It may be repeated, maybe the same guy, like, three times each. But, yeah, the Wikipedia said ten times. Ten times members of the War Thunder community have leaked classified information to the

War Thunder community about weapons systems so that the weapons systems in the game could be updated to be more realistic and reflect their actual specifications. Mostly in arguments, too. One is like the turret speed of some Chinese tank or something. And they were arguing, like, it was like, no, it's blank meters for seconds. It's like, no, it's that many meters per second. It's like, yeah, well, look at this. And it's like a classified like manual that, again, this isn't, you know, I'm sure like, every

government, you know, major has this already, right? But like, it's technically classified. And that was like their way of like proving their point was posting me. classified manual. Well, you've got to get these things right. Yeah, it's very. One way to get them right. But it sounds like we've got like two separate problems.

One is too many people have clearance or maybe that's the number that you need. But I mean, it's a crazy number. And we also have probably too much classified information. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's another. That's, that means there's two big problem. That is two big problems.

And like a lot of it, I hate to, I hate to do this, but it's like, uh, thanks 9-11. for, you know, in some ways for both these problems, because like 9-11 and lightly viewed as this huge intelligence failure. And so after that, we build this enormous intelligence state, surveillance state in this country. You know, you create this new thing called the Department of Homeland Security to kind of oversee it and correlate everything and create these like giant intelligence farms that, you know, gather everything. and somebody's got to sort through all that stuff. And yeah, the other problem is that the way we classify things in this country is pretty wild. I mean, that's led to, I would argue,

multiple presidents taking home documents that they should not have been taking home. It's just like a lot of stuff gets classified. And you will have, I've, you know, I've talked to people where they're working in the Pentagon and they want to make sure that their memo gets seen so they'll make that memo top secret just to give it like a little juke.

Muge. It's like SEO gaming, right? Exactly. Yeah. Or, you know, flag a priority email. Yeah. Has anyone ever, by the way, looked at something sooner because of the email said priority? Or do you just put it in the trash like me?

I mean, any more, my email is just sludge, right? It's like 99% just garbage. All right. So what else are you? What's next in this story, Eric? Yeah, so I mean, now we're actually, I've had all this time hunting down these leaks like their Pokemon cars, basically. Now we're actually doing some analysis of them, which I think has also been understated to all this kind of, I mean, I should be the last person to talk about this and complain about it, but there's been so much talk about Jack and Jack this and Jack that. And like, it's like a soap opera.

But the leaks themselves are pretty interesting stuff in them. So over a Belling guy, I worked out a couple articles. He's kind of looking at contextualizing some of the information in the leaks. Most of the big bombshells have been reported already by like big legacy media, but like kind of a digital. investigative perspective. There's some interesting little bits in here. You can kind of find more information in digging and contextual stuff. So more about the leaks themselves. Hopefully more of these will come. The Washington Post is doing a slow drip of new ones they have access to, so you'll see more from them. And there might be another story too about kind of the server itself and other members of it,

kind of like, what was it really like? Because I mean, you heard kind of in the beginning of our talk how like, you know, there's, I have two or three people I've talked to her in a server and there's conflicting accounts around like, you know, the makeup of the server, what people thought, you know, who was Jack, how did he act, how do people think about him. So, I don't know, kind of a, eventually at some point, I don't know, maybe it probably won't be me, but somebody's going to write an oral history of Thugshaker Central. It'll be out in one day.

It'll be like the New York Magazine or Vanity Fair will put it out at some point. Eric Toller, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Sure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. with the assistance of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money.

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