A 21-year-old man named Jack Teixeira was arrested by US government agents for allegedly leaking hundreds of confidential documents to his playmates via a Discord server recently.
Teixeira was a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard and was trained as a “Cyber Transport Systems Specialist,” the New York Times reported. He managed to get hold of these secret documents and started sharing them with his friends on a Discord channel from October 2022. It is not known exactly how he got the leaked information.
His Steam profile played an important role in Teixeira’s capture, as NYT reporter Christiaan Triebert reported on Twitter: She had a Steam account with a link to her Instagram account, which contained pictures of her childhood home. She also shared photos of her kitchen, which has a counter that matches the pictures of the same counter that the leaked documents were photographed. Allegedly, these documents contained information on Ukrainian war maps and assessments of the Russian army.
Teixeira is now accused of violating the Espionage Act, and it looks like he just wanted to impress his friends in the Discord chat group. The whole incident also stands out as a controversial embarrassment to the US military intelligence community, which will likely have to face some big questions about how this person got access to top secret data.
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