Today, Explained - The Discord leaks

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Federal officials have charged a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard with posting a trove of classified documents online. Politico’s Erin Banco explains. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Haleema Shah with help from Amina Al-Sadi. It was edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlin, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A 21-year-old airman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard who's accused of leaking classified documents to his friends on the Internet was charged today under the Espionage Act. The charges are unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. The Department of Justice says Jack Teixeira, who went by Jack the Dripper on Discord, started leaking classified information months ago before the government caught on, possibly as late as this week. Coming up on Today Explained, in a world in which a lot of us believe the government is able to keep tabs on us,

why did it take so long for the government to realize what was happening to its private stuff in the most public place, the internet? Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk,

an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Erin Banco. Erin covers intelligence for Politico, and she's been following the path of the leaked government documents. So it appears that these first documents appeared on a social media platform called Discord, which is essentially just another sort of messaging social media platform.

And we're still learning sort of the extent to which they, and frequency with which they were posted. But it appears that last year is when they first began to appear. And tell me about their trajectory. I understand they first appeared in one Discord server, then they kind of spread. What happened there? That's right. So what we know is that there was a very small Discord channel server called Thug Shaker Central. There were about 20 to 25 people that were members of this group, mostly younger men, gamers, people who were really into video games, other people who said they really liked guns, mostly lean conservative, Republican, right-wing. And that is where those documents first appeared. It wasn't until months

later that one of the members of that original group then reposted the images to a second Discord server. And then from there, those images then appeared even more widespread on other social media apps like Telegram and Twitter. What was in the documents? What do they say? So the documents, as I've seen them and as they've been reported, are pretty broad in the sense that they touch on a lot of different areas, but primarily they deal with the war in Ukraine. These documents contain incredibly sensitive information about Ukrainian troop movements, strengths and weaknesses, including weaknesses in their air defenses, as well as really important and new information about just how far the U.S. intelligence community has been able to go in penetrating the Russian defense ministry as well. But then they also deal with intelligence reporting from countries that span the globe, really, from the Middle East to China to other parts of Asia. Other documents show the extent of U.S. spying operations on South Korea and Israel, including, with relation to South Korea, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about their concerns over a U.S. request for ammunition that would be sent to Ukraine.

You know, I'm an intelligence reporter, so I see some of this stuff a lot. And I can say that the documents are extremely sensitive in the sense that they really lay out the extent to which the U.S. spies on its adversaries, but also on its allies. It contains very detailed information about really current day global events. The documents are already prompting allies to respond. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing back after one document suggested leaders of Israel's spy agency had encouraged protests against his proposed judicial reforms. I think that's what makes these documents sort of shocking is that, you know, in past leaks, we've seen, you know, documents that have been held in servers for years leaked

out to the press. But these documents really talk about very real national security issues that are happening in real time. You said they appeared on Discord late last year. I don't think this became a news story until this month. At what point did American authorities say, we have a problem here, guys? The Washington Post has actually reported that the documents, or transcripts of the documents at least, appeared starting all the way back in the summer of 2022. The tranche that I've seen didn't show up online until probably January. But we do know from this Washington Post reporting

that the leak spanned perhaps all the way back to the summer of 2022. Our sourcing suggests that the government did not know that these documents were circulating until last week. Wow. Do we know why it took that long? I think there are a lot of questions about why the government didn't know that these documents were spreading online. I think it's fair to assume that the documents were held within this original Discord channel pretty tightly. We've seen interviews and reporting to suggest that the members of this original server basically had a pact not to post the images elsewhere, not to share them with anyone. And it's not like the government has an office that just is responsible

for prowling the internet for leaked classified documents, right? The government maintains it doesn't spy on Americans, on its own citizens. There are limitations about the extent to which government agencies can even go on to social media and look at users' profiles if there's no specific threat or open, you know, law enforcement case. But I do think that we'll start to see members of Congress on Capitol Hill when they return next week begin to ask questions about whether or not we need to think through this a little bit more about how we can identify potential illegal activity that's happening online if, you know, it doesn't fall squarely into, for example, the terrorism bucket

or the threatening acts of violence bucket. It's so interesting because I think a lot of us think, oh, the government is watching us all the time. They know what we're doing. And here we have proof that, no, perhaps they aren't and they don't. So the authorities find the documents online. It's very clear that someone has leaked them. Do they then start looking for the leaker or the leakers immediately? From what I can tell, a lot of the information that was first made available about the leak happened, outlining how researchers had basically found this original Discord server, talked to members on the server. There was about three other members in the voice chat with me when I first found out that these were public, made public.

It felt like my heart was beating out of its chest, and my legs were buckling, and I could not believe that this was happening. We didn't realize the sheer, just immense nature of these leaks until a bit later. If you do the sort of digging and searching in an open source way, it's not really that hard to figure out, you know, who was a part of this original server. So I imagine that the government, all they had to do was subpoena Discord, get lists of people who were on that original server, and then start asking questions. Discord has said that they've been cooperating with law enforcement, with the government investigation. They haven't said, you know, specifically that they received a subpoena. But I imagine once you understand that the server is on Discord, that there was one group of people, that it's pretty easy to identify who the leaker is. Okay, so there's a big search for the leaker. We don't know all of the details of the search. But then yesterday, there's a huge development. Tell me about what happened. So as soon as the New York Times divulged the name of the alleged leaker,

it really went very quickly from there. Within, I'd say, an hour and a half, we see the FBI being photographed in front of this individual's house. We see them doing a search on television. You know, we have drones flying around this individual's house. We see them doing a search on television. You know, we have drones flying around this kid's house. We see tons of law enforcement activity. The New York Times is there taking photos. And very quickly, this individual is arrested and taken into custody. Okay, who is this guy? So this individual is Jack Teixeira. He's 21 years old and he lives in the Taunton, Massachusetts area, sort of the North Dighton township. He works on a base there. He is a part of the Air National Guard, specifically works in an intelligence unit within that guard.

He works on sort of cybersecurity issues. The 21-year-old was in the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. He was working as a cyber transport systems journeyman. In other words, he was responsible for keeping the internet working at all the air bases. And no doubt, we will learn more. We also know that he comes from a family that has longstanding ties to the specific intelligence wing. His stepfather worked at the airbase for 34 years, retired from the intelligence wing in 2019.

His stepbrother, Alex, is a current member of that intelligence wing. It seems to me, based off of reporting from, you know, interviews with friends of this individual who were also part of the Discord channel that Jack leaned more conservative. He owned guns. He was described by one of the friends on the Discord server as just being very concerned about world events. The Washington Post says it spoke to a friend of the alleged leaker, agreeing not to name or show the young man who said this about his friend. He disagreed with several occasions such as Waco and Ruby Ridge and thought that the government is overreaching in several aspects.

And that's why he leaked the documents and wanted to inform his friends about what was going on in the world. You know, I don't know if I really buy that, to be honest with you, but that's at least how he's been described by people who know him. But what we also know about Jack and some of the other individuals on this Discord server is that they have been videoed and other messages have been captured that show them speaking very negatively about other races and cultures, very racist talk on some of these forums. I think some of the videos have shown him shooting a gun, yelling sort of racist, anti-Semitic remarks.

So that's sort of the extent to which we understand Jack at this point. Do we have any idea of a motive of why he did this i think the motive is still you know an open question his friends on this discord server has described him as leaking the content to educate and to inform i'm not sure i really understand jack's motive yet It could be that he was trying to impress his friends about the level of access he had in these servers. It could be he really had ideological reasons for doing it. We just don't know a lot about that yet. Erin Banco of Politico. More with her after this. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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It's Today Explained. We're back with Politico's Aaron Benko, who covers intelligence. Aaron, we talked earlier in the show about how this might have happened, the logistics of it, how it appeared on Discord and then spread. What were the systemic problems that allowed a young guy with some amount of classified access to essentially surprise the United States government by leaking stuff that ended up all over the Internet. Right. So what we know about Jack Teixeira is that he is 21, which isn't all that young, you know, in terms of individuals who enter the Massachusetts Air National Guard or the military in general, right? What we do know is that individuals who work in this national security apparatus within the federal government have access to all sorts of kinds of intelligence, you know, top secret, highly sensitive, classified

documents and intelligence. And this is partly because if you think about what happened in the post-9-11 era, you know, what happened procedurally within the federal government after that is that there was a real push to share information across the federal government so that nothing like 9-11 would ever happen again. And so a lot of those policies have been in place now for decades, right? And so I think now we see lawmakers begin to question on Capitol Hill and other officials within the government about whether or not those policies need to be looked at again, whether or not we need everyone to have access to this kind of information. I think that's a debate we'll really begin to see play out

in the coming weeks and months. These documents are about the war in Ukraine and the information in them involves not just the United States and Ukraine, but many, many, many other countries. What has the fallout looked like on a global scale? Who's angry about this? Which countries are saying something about this? You know, it's been really interesting because we have not seen a ton of reaction from within the administration or frankly, Congress about the leak itself. You know, we've seen some murmurs from lawmakers on the intelligence community.

We've seen spokespeople for the Pentagon come to the podium and sort of talk about the leak. I think the American people need to know and deserve to know that we're taking this very, very seriously. There is no excuse. But the administration, you know, when we're just talking about the U.S. now, we've seen the administration really clamp down on having people talk about the leak in general. There's been a real push to get people not to talk about this until the investigation is over and until the administration really understands the extent of it. Internationally, we've seen countries like South Korea come out, you know, very angry about the leak because one of the documents in the

tranche shows that President Biden and his National Security Council had reached out to South Korea to consider sending ammunition to Ukraine. South Korea's defense minister has spoken with his U.S. counterpart to reassure each other their alliance is as strong as ever, both pointing out they believe a number of the leaked documents are false. Many of the disclosed documents are fabricated and our joint assessments are consistent with each other. We haven't seen a ton of reaction from Kyiv, from President Zelensky and his advisors,

which has been surprising. A lot of the information in the documents was about Ukraine and about the extent to which the U.S. is spying on Kyiv, you know, on the inner circles within Kyiv. This is being seen as a worrying development for a U.S. spying operation that has been remarkably efficient and remarkably effective throughout the war in Ukraine. So I'd say overall the response has been somewhat muted in a way that I wasn't fully expecting. President Biden himself, in his travels to Ireland, had said he's not sure

that he's all that concerned, basically, about the leak. But I think as the case begins to play out in public, in court, we'll begin to see more reaction. I was reading about Biden's remarks this morning, and his quote was, I'm concerned that it happened, but there's nothing contemporaneous that I'm aware of that is of great consequence.

The president of the United States is saying this is not a big deal. That feels surprising to me. It's surprising to me, too. And I can't tell if that's because the information that was within the documents is so widespread within the government, you know, that thousands of people have access to that information that he thinks just everyone knows about what was in the documents. Or if he really thinks that the information that was contained within it is not sensitive and that there's perhaps other information out there that he thinks is, you know, would be even more damaging if it were to come out. It's hard to sort of parse what he meant there. I know national security officials within the administration are really upset and concerned that this leak happened. They think it exposes sources and methods. It exposes how we use different intelligence mechanisms to gather intelligence and information that it puts people in harm's way. But maybe from an informational standpoint,

the president doesn't think that the information is all that damaging. It's hard to parse his words on that. How does this compare to past high profile, high level leaks of secretive government documents? So this leak has been sort of immediately compared to the WikiLeaks tranche of documents that came out between 2006 and about 2020, where Julian Assange and other people who worked at WikiLeaks were publishing, you know, millions of documents, some of them very secret, very sensitive, about all sorts of, you know, global events. The whistleblower faces up to 175 years in a U.S. prison if he is finally extradited and eventually convicted of leaking American military secrets. Now, the leak we're talking about here

is much smaller in scale. I think we're talking maybe hundreds of documents. But what's different about this leak is that the documents that are being leaked are documents that deal with real-time national security issues and events. You know, the war in Ukraine is still ongoing. What's being leaked is very sensitive because we're talking about conversations that happened, you know, between world leaders just like last month. And so in a way, these documents are more piercing and more damaging because they deal with real-time events, which can really affect things on the ground, perhaps, for example, in Ukraine. You know, we saw the leak with Reality Winner, where she leaked, you know, documents that had to do with the 2016 election. She was hit with the longest sentence ever imposed on a civilian

for leaking classified information to the media. But again, those were only just a few documents. They went through the media. So again, what's different about this leak is that it didn't go through media sources. We're not necessarily dealing with an individual who had a certain ideological belief where they wanted to package the material in a way that was framed in a certain way that was then passed on through the media and would get disseminated that way. I mean, these documents were just dumped on Discord to a very small group of people. So it's curious in a way. What are the immediate consequences now? Is there some office in Washington, D.C. where everyone is on lockdown? Are people's passwords being changed and they're being kicked off of servers? What do you think is happening today behind closed doors at the Pentagon, for example? So I know the Pentagon has begun to talk about ways

to perhaps change their policies about who gets access to certain kinds of material, how it gets disseminated, but we have not seen any sort of immediate lockdown or change in policy take place yet. I think the discussions are still underway. We continue to review a variety of factors as it relates to safeguarding classified materials. This includes examining and updating distribution lists, assessing how and where intelligence products are shared, and a variety of other steps.

And so should the American public assume, I don't mean to be cynical or even sinister, but should the American public assume that classified documents are just not that secure? I think it's fair to assume that a lot of classified information is perhaps in the hands of individuals who could potentially leak it, right? But that is the risk we've always taken with having classified information and security clearances. And again, in that post 9-11 era, we really expanded the range of people that had access to this information. You'll hear officials say we have very strict security clearance protocols and things like that. But again, I think that security clearance process is going to need to be reviewed. And I think it will be reviewed. We've already seen lawmakers and

officials begin to talk about that. That was Erin Benko. She covers intelligence at Politico. Today's show was produced by Halima Shah and Avishai Artsy. It was edited by Matthew Collette and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlain. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Jalur Thank you.