Why Discord is at the heart of a major US intelligence leak

A military intelligence breach has been blamed on users of the popular gaming platform Discord, after secret documents were uploaded there and widely circulated on the internet. The person who allegedly uploaded that sensitive material has since been identified, thanks in part to another gaming platform, Steam, and arrested under the Espionage Act.

The FBI arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira on Thursday in connection with an investigation into the leak of classified military documents that circulated on social media earlier in April. Teixeira is an American security guard with an intelligence division of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to the New York Times. He was arraigned Friday in Boston on two charges that violate the espionage law: unauthorized retention and disclosure of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents. Teixeira could face up to 15 years in prison reported the BBC.

Teixeira allegedly published snapshots of printed secret briefings on a small Discord server called Thug Shaker Central, where about two dozen members, including teens, posted racist memes and talked about guns and video games like Call of Duty and Halo, according to research and education director Aric Toler of research collective Bellingcat. (Toler said on Twitter dat Teixera’s Steam account, dat led to his identificationshowed arm 3, PUBG: battlefields, Garry’s Mod, CounterattackAnd Iron hearts 4.)

US government officials have confirmed the authenticity of most of the documents detailing the strategy surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine and other sensitive information about Canada, South Korea, Israel, Egypt and other countries. Some documents contain information dated back to February, which means they are quite current. Teixeira allegedly posted these documents back in December.

Those documents had been on Discord for months, spread across a few different servers, Bellingcat reported earlier in April. Teixeira first published the documents on the tiny Thug Shaker Central server, according to the Washington Post, before a teen in the group leaked them on a separate Discord server owned by a YouTube creator called wow_mao. Ten of those documents were also published on the Minecraft Earth Map server, where they spread to thousands of members and were discovered a month later by the US government through social media. The leak has thrown a spotlight on Discord, typically associated with gaming communities.

What does Discord have to do with the leak?

Discord as a company has little or nothing to do with this. People are free to create and use Discord servers without company permission; people use the platform for various reasons. Discord servers are social hubs often built around topics and people. Some people have Discord servers that are used exclusively to communicate with small groups of friends while playing video games. Other servers have thousands of members gathered around individual Twitch streamers or video games. The Minecraft The Earth Map server, where the secret documents ended up, has thousands of members interested in high quality Minecraft Cards.

Discord as a platform, while largely associated with gamers, spread to the mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic; it’s an easy, free way to keep in touch and share information with people. Discord says it has 150 million monthly active users, with about 19 million active servers per week. The chat platform offers text, video, and voice-based chat, and people can even live stream video games and other media to each other. Since the servers are mostly private, it’s up to moderators and creators to control what happens in their spaces. This means that Discord servers can easily become places for bad actors who, at best, post tasteless jokes and, at worst, describe the racist ideology of a teenager who would inflict tragedy on a Buffalo community.

Discord enforces community guidelines to ensure the safety of its users, something highlighted in transparency reports. But with millions of users, things could slip through if Discord figures out how to enforce the rules proactively rather than reactively. That’s how Teixeira was able to share so many documents online without much notice until they spread elsewhere; originally he published the documents for a relatively small group. Members of the Thug Shaker Central Discord community, where Teixeira went under the “OG” handle, communicated there because of their mutual interest in guns, video games, and military equipment, reported the Post.

Discord said in an emailed statement to Polygon that it has been cooperating with officials and will continue to do so as the investigation progresses. The full statement follows:

We are aware that law enforcement has arrested the person accused of illegally posting classified material on our platform. We have been working with officials and remain committed to doing so as this investigation continues. While Discord values ​​the privacy of our users, we believe our platform best meets everyone’s needs when we collectively engage in responsible online behavior. Our Terms of Service expressly prohibit using Discord for illegal or criminal purposes, including sharing documents on Discord that may be verifiably classified.

When Discord’s Trust and Safety team becomes aware of infringing content, we act quickly to remove it. In this case, we banned users involved in the original distribution of the material, removed content that violated our Terms, and issued warnings to users who continue to share the material in question.

What’s in the leaked documents?

The leak was originally thought to only contain information about Russia’s war against Ukraine, but there are other documents that contain “sensitive briefing material on Canada, China, Israel and South Korea, in addition to the Indo-Pacific military theater and the Middle East.” “. East,” according to The New York Times.

The Times has a detailed overview of the contents of the documents, of which there are at least a hundred. One document, the newspaper said, contains several scenarios that could affect Russia’s war against Ukraine, including predictions about what would happen if either Russian President Vladimir Putin or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky died. The Times reported that the leak is seemingly confirmation that “the United States is spying on allies and adversaries alike,” which could affect the country’s relationship with its allies.

Other documents discuss South Korea’s apparent fear that the US “might lead South Korean weapons to Kiev”; examine “scenarios that could lead to Israel supplying arms to Ukraine”; and suggest that Israel’s foreign intelligence agency “may have encouraged agency staff and Israeli citizens to participate in the anti-government protests that rocked the country in March,” according to the Times story.

Several documents were later manipulated to alter information about the war in Ukraine – most notably to inflate and lower the number of casualties in Ukraine for Russia, according to the Times. The Pentagon has not outright verified that they are authentic, but said some “contain sensitive and highly classified material.” The Pentagon is still reviewing the documents, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said told press.

The correctness of the intelligence of the documents has not been verified. Department of Defense Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said at a news conference Thursday that the breach was a violation of United States security guidelines to keep sensitive information safe. “This was an intentional criminal act,” he said.

President Biden told the press on Thursday that he was “not concerned” about the information emerging from the leak, despite the top secret nature of the documents. Still, the information from the leak required Teixeira to have top secret clearance; the 102nd intelligence wing to which Teixeira was assigned is responsible for packaging “intelligence from various sources” for global senior military leaders, That reports a CNN source. Teixeira did not work directly with the intelligence, CNN said, but needed permission to work on the networks the department used to store the information.

“People who sign agreements to receive classified documents recognize the importance to national security of not disclosing those documents — and we intend to send that message of how important it is to our national security,” he said. Attorney General Merrick Garland. during a press conference on Friday.

How did the authorities find the leaker?

We don’t yet know how the government found Teixeira, but the Times detailed the “trail of digital evidence” linking the aviator to the leaked documents. Many of the leaked documents were photographs of printed paper, often showing details in the background. The Times found a Steam profile linked to Teixeira’s name; from there it found an Instagram profile with pictures of Teixeira’s childhood home. The countertop in the photos matched the countertop on which the leaked documents were photographed.

Photo: Kylie Cooper for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Several members of the Thug Shaker Central Discord group spoke to the press, but both the Times and the Post said members had not provided Teixeira’s name.

According to new court documents, the FBI used Discord invoices to find Teixeira That reports the Associated Press. The FBI got Teixeira’s Discord username from an unnamed source, according to the court documents, who began posting classified information around December, according to the person. Teixeira’s name and address were both linked to his Discord account. The FBI arrested Teixeira Thursday at a home in North Dighton, Massachusetts. He was arraigned in court the next day in Boston.

Has this happened before?

This isn’t the first time government military secrets have been leaked on gaming forums. In fact, fans of the free-to-play battle simulator War thunder are known for this, particularly for leaking information to win arguments between players. In January, a War thunder player posted a manual for an F-16A fighter jet called the Fighting Falcon, a model that was just added to the game. One day later someone posted limited information on the McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet. Last year, a user posted official documents related to a Chinese anti-tank weapon. Before that, it was the United Kingdom’s Challenger 2 main battle tank that leaked, followed by the French Leclerc main battle tank.

Developer Eagle Dynamics, known for its Digital Combat Simulator games, also came under fire in 2019, after a Russian employee was charged with conspiracy and smuggling for using the DCS World forum to get help sending F -16 manuals from USA.