Inside One of the Worst Leaks in U.S. History

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, we turn now to one of the most significant intelligence leaks in recent years. This week, the U.S. Air National Guard took disciplinary action against 15 service members for failing to prevent 21-year-old Guardsman Jack Teixeira from allegedly sharing hundreds of classified documents online. He’s currently pleading not guilty as he awaits trial. Well, now a new frontline documentary, “The Discord Leaks,” explores how the gaming platform not only became a central — a center for security breaches, but for unmoderated extremism. It’s a result of investigations by Washington Post reporters Samuel Oakford and Shane Harris. And they joined Hari Sreenivasan to discuss their findings.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Bianna. Sam Oakford, Shane Harris. Thank you both for joining us. Sam, kind of bring our audience back up to speed here. Who was the individual at the center of all this?

SAM OAKFORD, VIDEO FORENSICS REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Jack Teixeira, an 21-year-old international guardsman from Massachusetts is the person ultimately suspected of doing these leaks, right? So, we can go back to April, and Shane and I started on this story. There was intelligence trickling out on social media. It turned out it came from Discord. We were able to obtain several 100 images that have been tied to Teixeira and we spent the last six, eight months actually tracking down the other people he interacted with on Discord, which is the platform where he started to share these over a year ago.

SREENIVASAN: Sam, I want to get to Discord and what that’s all about in a second here. But, Shane, put this in perspective. How significant of a leak of classified and top-secret information was this?

SHANE HARRIS, INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, in terms of the quantity that was leaked, it was very significant. It was one of the worst leaks in recent years of U.S. intelligence. What distinguish this one from other leaks was the breadth of it, I think, and the timeliness. So, Teixeira allegedly was taking documents from his workplace that covered just about every conceivable global hotspot you could imagine, the war in Ukraine, things that are going on in North Korea, China, elsewhere in Russia, other parts of Asia, really kind of a global look at what the Intelligence Community was collecting. And it was very timely. He was sharing recent and contemporary battlefield updates about what was happening in Ukraine with his friends. So, it really is kind of the breadth of this. It’s almost kind of like a sample of everything the Intelligence Community would be looking at a given point in time.

SREENIVASAN: So, Sam, this individual had access to this information because of where he worked, right, and the type of job that he did. Tell us a little bit about how he was sharing this information. How would he get these top-secret files, so to speak, out of the office and onto Discord? And also, for people who haven’t used Discord, what’s so special about that platform?

OAKFORD: Yes. The Air Force released a report, the summary of a report this week, actually, which shed some more light on how he might have been gaining access to the material. Now, he had top-secret clearance to begin with, but he was more of an I.T. worker and that didn’t necessarily mean that he needed to see all of this material. The Air Force report determined that this base, Otis Air National Guard base in Cape Cod was actually showing people that maybe didn’t need to know, as the term says, this classified material. So, he had access in that sense, but he was really more of an I.T. worker. Now, we don’t know exactly how at all times he was bringing it home or sharing it, but it changed over time. Initially, he was posting a text. He was sharing things kind of casualty counts related to the Ukraine war. He started to make those updates a little more elaborate. And then, ultimately, towards the end of last year, we’ve been told is that he started to post images themselves. So, clearly, he was taking these home because he was taking them actually at his house. And he was caught several times by his superiors at the base, but that did not interrupt his leaking as it turned out. And Discord itself is a closed platform, it’s a little bit different than Facebook or Twitter, or what people might imagine. There’s big chat rooms. He actually ran a server, as they’re called. It was called Thug Shaker Central, which is a pretty racist and homophobic name, and that’s where he was leaking some of these documents with this close-knit community, and he also leaked on a separate server, and neither of these were noticed by Discord itself.

SREENIVASAN: So, Shane, how do we get from him leaking it in this otherwise private community, as Sam was mentioning, this isn’t like, you know, posting it to Twitter or Facebook, Instagram and it going viral, how did it get from what he was sharing in that kind of chat room, if you will, to your radar and to the world’s?

HARRIS: Well, what we found is that, ultimately, somebody in this tight- knit circle, and we should say these are mostly teenage boys who were kind of these followers who looked up to Jack and they hung out every day in this Discord server, one of them took a chunk of these documents, about four dozen of them and shared them to another place on Discord, where then they are picked up by someone else and they’re reposted and the spill kind of begins from there. Now, the members of this server, several of them told us they understood there was kind of an unwritten rule, don’t share this information outside our little club. Well, this one individual apparently violates that, and that’s what sets off this kind of chain reaction in late February of this year. And April is when U.S. officials and others start to notice that these documents are now popping up all around the internet. And that’s when journalists like Sam and myself became aware of it and ultimately tried to figure out where these documents had come from and who had posted them.

SREENIVASAN: So, Sam, tell us a little bit about how you go about figuring out who this individual is kind of before the details are released from an investigation or anything. And then, how do you figure out who his friends are to get them to talk with you for the story and also for this front line special?

OAKFORD: Yes. So, in April, there were already some clues about where this might have been from. They were popping up on Telegram, on Twitter and other platforms like Fortune (ph), that are more fringe. But it pretty quickly became clear that they originally were coming from Discord, right? And then we started to get clues about who his friends might be. And ultimately, Shane and I were able to talk to some of those members of this close-knit server very early on. And we actually published something within days before Teixeira was arrested. So, we have that in kind of with this community, which is something we’ve used for the past six months to paint a picture of Teixeira.

SREENIVASAN: Did these people want to speak with you, especially in a video format?

OAKFORD: It was tricky. It could go both ways, right? These were kids that had spent a lot of the pandemic really starve for interaction and that really played a role in the dynamic in the community that they were in with Teixeira where he took on this almost, you know, uncle like role. He was disseminating knowledge. That was kind of how he framed this very strange situation where he’s giving them classified information. But they were eager to tell their story because I think that they, in some cases, really were trying to work through what had happened. And this reporting may have helped them in that sense.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gore was posted. You’d post videos of jihadi, you know, beheadings and things like that, or cartel killings. You’d be like, dude, look at this guy getting his head chopped off. It was cool.

OAKFORD: What do you think about this now? We’re talking about —

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I’m definitely not proud of it at all. It’s embarrassing and it’s quite frankly humiliating to speak about it now, but I’m willing to.

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SREENIVASAN: Shane, you mentioned that this was not the first time or the first instance of Teixeira getting in trouble on his job. So, I’m wondering how many opportunities missed were there before we get to this point where all of these different secrets are out?

HARRIS: Yes. There were many missed opportunities, and that’s one of the really key features, I think, of this story and where there’s a lot of accountability on the Defense Department early to answer for this. There are at least four instances that have been documented so far by Air Force investigators of to share a being spotted by his superiors in the secure facility where he worked at that Air National Guard base routing around and classified documents, reading classified documents, taking notes on them in some cases, and he really was not supposed to be doing that. And he’s reprimanded for that and told to stop but he keeps doing it. And what you see is that while he’s being worn and sort of scolded, no one steps in to either pull him off the line or restrict his access. And what this new Air Force investigation has found this week is that no one in his chain of command reported him to the relevant security officials whose job it is to step in when someone violates those rules and suspend them or restrict their access or withhold their clearance. That just never happened. And the Air Force investigation faulted the Air National Guard there for what they call the culture of complacency about Teixeira. And they found other instances too, in which people were probably looking at classified information that they didn’t really need to see. Now, none of those people are accused of leaking it, we should say. There really is an environment that seemed quite permissive where the normal rules around how you handle classified information just were not followed by the leaders of that unit.

SREENIVASAN: So, Shane, were there other members of the military held accountable for this?

HARRIS: Well, so far, the Air Force has said that they’ve disciplined 15 people in connection with this incident, which is a pretty significant number, I think. Perhaps most notably the colonel who was in command of the 102nd intelligence wing where this occurred and were Teixeira work has been relieved of his command, which is a rather severe punishment. So, there’s definitely accountability. But so far, I have to say, it’s really focused on this particular unit where this happened. I think what we found is that the security clearance process and other mechanisms that are put in place to prevent something like this don’t seem to be working and capturing the kind of people or the red flags that might end with the next Jack Teixeira might be. So, I think there’s more broader accountability here that’s not being captured simply by this one investigation at Otis International Guard Base.

SREENIVASAN: So, Sam, I understand that the Department of Defense cannot perform the type of forensic deep dive that you might have, but it is kind of astounding to me that you were able to find so many different connections to Jack, what he’s been posting, where the other platforms where he might’ve been active, and the military could not. I mean, is there something in our intake system? Is there something in our vetting process? Is there something in what gets someone clearance that is just broken?

OAKFORD: Well, as Shane alluded to, there was very little visibility about what Jack was doing on the internet, and that starts with the clearance process, right? He went through what should be a rigorous background check for getting this top-secret security clearance. But what we confirmed in our reporting was that the military does not really look at people’s online activity in a meaningful way. And for someone like Teixeira, a person at his age, who is the kind of person who would be populating the lower ranks of the military every day, right, these are people who are spending their entire lives online, in some cases, if they’re gamers, right, you know, outside of their jobs, and that clearance process does not look at that. And there were red flags in Teixeira’s history going back to his high school years where he was suspended for making threat of violence and making racist comments at school, that was overlooked, but they were aware of it appears, but they really were not aware of any of the activity that he engaged online, which was already racist and was already involving threats of violence separate to that incident at his school. So, that’s really the origin of this total lack of visibility about what Teixeira was doing, which was then followed by, you know, a cascading series of failures that changes described.

SREENIVASAN: Sam, without necessarily repeating some of the explicit stuff, can you give us an idea of what these communities were like on Discord where Jack Teixeira was spreading this information?

OAKFORD: I think it’s important to note that, you know, many, many people use Discord in ways that aren’t like what these kids were doing. Many of these kids also spent time on, you know, places like Fortune (ph) where the language can be really toxic, really racist, really antisemitic. And the way Discord is structured means that you can create a community in the way that you want it to be, right. And that’s some of the selling points — that’s a selling point that they have. Another a key aspect of Discord’s — of their dynamic is that they don’t really monitor what’s going on outside of very narrow cases. So, for instance, a child sexual exploitation, right? If there’s material like that, they might catch it. But if you’re running a server where you’re, you know, making racist comments often or in Teixeira’s case, actually posting videos where you’re making comments like that, they don’t appear to be catching that all. And that’s something they told us.

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HARRIS: We found Thug Shaker Central violated several other terms of services, hate speech, images of gore, threats of violence. These are all things that we’ve documented in our reporting as well. Why were these particular kids allowed to continue sharing this kind of material for more than a year?

JOHN REDGRAVE, V.P., TRUST AND SAFETY, DISCORD: This comes down to our ability to identify what’s happening in these spaces. We rely on user reports. We rely on third-parties to help us with intelligence. None of that happened here.

HARRIS: Well, none of it was likely to happen because they were all part of this community. I mean, if one of them objected to racist and antisemitic comments being made routinely they might have flagged it, but they didn’t because they were all in on that. Is — so, is what you’re saying is that the company has no way of monitoring for that kind of content on its own?

REDGRAVE: We require that people are helping to keep Discord safe. We do scan spaces in particular for child sex abuse material. That is unambiguously bad. But when it comes to other classes of abuse, we all need to collectively think about, are we just diving into someone’s privacy?

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SREENIVASAN: Shane, we have just in the last 15, 20 years, lived through very high-profile leak situations, whether it’s WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, and oftentimes there are these after-action reports, the military says that, here’s how we’re going to buckle down, here’s how we’re going to prevent this from happening in the future. Wishful thinking. I mean, why are we back here? Why are we talking about another one of these? And again, this is still a year and a half, two years after the fact, who knows what’s being inappropriately shared today.

HARRIS: Yes. And I think you’re right to point out those other leaks because they all have something in common with what Teixeira is alleged to have done, which is that someone who had top-secret clearance and had access to all of this information abused the privileged access that they had. And every time that this happens, the military, you’re right, comes in and tries to sort of tweak the system a little bit to make it less likely that that would happen. But fundamentally, there’s not a change to the sort of the basic architecture of this system, which is that post 9/11, the Intelligence Community, the military, the government as a whole made a decision to make classified intelligence much more widely available to a broad variety of people who have clearances. And there was a reason for that. I mean, before 9/11 information was siloed. It was arguably over protected and the situation we had was where, you know, people at the FBI didn’t know what the CIA knew about 19 people who were about to get on airplanes. So, they tried to correct that in the government by spreading out that access. What they’ve never done, though, is really try to regulate on an individual level who gets to see certain documents and who doesn’t. We’ve talked to people, including lawmakers in our reporting who said, look, there’s technology available that could essentially make it so a guy like Jack Teixeira, who is just the maintenance person, if he spotted lingering on documents, calling up documents, searching for them, that could potentially flag someone to say, wait a second, it doesn’t look like you’re doing something that tracks with what your job responsibilities are. Why is that happening? And we just don’t really have a system on a kind of a pervasive system wide level to gate that access, if you like. And why the military is not doing it? It could be hard. It could be cumbersome. And it’s kind of like, there’s a level of bureaucratic inertia here, I think. This is the way they’ve been doing it for 20 years. And with every one of these leaks that really seems to be an attitude of this is kind of the cost of doing business, we’re always going to have an insider threat like this, the overwhelming majority of people don’t leak information, but when they do, as we’ve seen, it can be incredibly damaging.

SREENIVASAN: Sam Oakford and Shane Harris, reporters from the “Washington Post”, but also co-producers of the Frontline documentary called “The Discord Leaks” that you can see at PBS, thanks so much for joining us.

HARRIS: Thank you.

OAKFORD: Thank you.