Law enforcement officers arrested a 21-year-old on Thursday after tracing a trove of classified secrets that made their way to the public via the chat app Discord.
The suspect, Jack Teixeira, a member of the US Air Force National Guard, was identified by The New York Times prior to his arrest. Teixeira reportedly ran a private Discord group where a small group of men posted memes and discussed shared interests, including gaming and guns.
“Today, the Justice Department has arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transfer of classified national defense information,” Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Teixeira will appear in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts for the first time.
According to The Washington Post, the classified documents come from a small Discord server known as “Thug Shaker Central” — a nod to the room’s racist overtones. In February, a member of that Discord group began sharing the material on a wider Discord server called “wow_mao”. A month later, they appeared in a Minecraft channel with thousands of members.
Thursday’s arrest came relatively quickly. But the cache of intelligence documents, containing many previously classified, sensitive details about the war in Ukraine, had been circulating online for months before the US caught on. That fact has raised alarms within the federal government, which could expand the scope of social media services it monitors in response.
This story develops…