A U.S. Airman charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information made public at the first federal court appearance on friday morning
The person accused of leaking classified documents to someone on social media has been charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information.
The airman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who is also accused of being a drug user, made his first appearance in federal court in Boston Friday morning.
Teixeira’s arrest came a week after the initial public disclosure that the classified material had been posted online to a small Discord group, a social media platform popular with gamers. The documents, some of which have been reviewed by CNN, included a wide range of highly classified information, including eavesdropping on key allies and adversaries and blunt assessments on the state of the Ukraine war.
Teixeira is believed to be the head of an obscure invite-only Discord chatroom called Thug Shaker Central, multiple US officials told CNN, where information from the classified documents was first posted months ago.
The man wearing a tan shirt and pants entered the courtroom wearing hiking boots. He entered the courtroom in shackles, though his hands were uncuffed before he sat down at the defense table.
The Boston courtroom was full, including three people sitting on a bench reserved for family. He didn’t look at his family when he entered the courtroom.
The Charged Documents on the Otis Air Force Base: A Case Study of a US Navy Soldier Having a TS/SCI clearance
Lucca had stature and anonymity that allowed the documents to remain on the platform for weeks without repercussions. The platform was assumed to be fake, because no one would dare post US military secrets on it.
His job was not to package the intelligence for those senior commanders, but to help with the network of intel that was highly classified. For that purpose, the official said Teixeira would be required to have a TS/SCI clearance, in the instance that he was exposed to that level of intelligence.
“A lot of people were wary of him,” said Brooke Cleathero, who attended middle school and high school with Teixeira. He had a fascination with war and guns that made him off-putting to a lot of people.
The charging documents say that he worked at the 104th Intelligence Wing at Otis Air Force Base in Cape Cod, Mass. The military base where the step-father and step-brother worked has two people working at it: Teixeira’s father and brother.
Teixeira didn’t behave in a manner that rose to the level where “people felt the need to report him,” another former classmate said, but “he made me nervous.”
The same student said she took his fascination with the military as a form of American nationalism, and was therefore surprised by the allegations against him. “I didn’t think he would be capable of doing something like this,” she said.
The Investigation of Edward Snowden’s Leaky Discord Account of a High-Sensitive American Air Force Candidate
Biden was continually briefed on the state of the investigation while abroad, as well as the efforts of his top officials to engage with allies over the leaked information, officials said. Behind the scenes, that effort was a reality that loomed over a deeply personal and important foreign trip for Biden, one official acknowledged.
When he made his first comments about the matter, Biden downplayed the significance of the leak. Biden told reporters that he was concerned that it happened, but that there was nothing significant that he knew about.
The 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard faces two criminal counts: unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.
On April 6th, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon was looking into who may have leaked the documents.
It’s not the first time a person with an IT background has been suspected of leaking classified information. Edward Snowden, who released a trove of documents from the National Security Agency in 2013, was a federal contractor and systems administrator in Hawaii at the time. Generally, IT professionals have access to an array of records and servers in order to fix technical problems.
The federal complaint stated that the purpose of divulging secret information was to discuss conflicts of interest.
FBI agents likely worked backward from the initial Discord posts to build a profile of the leaker, combing through his other online accounts to “put a human behind a keyboard,” Ferrante, who is now global head of cybersecurity at FTI Consulting, told CNN.
Orthodox Catholicism, guns, as well as racist, vile meme were popular things that many people found interested in while using the Discord channel where Teixeira leaked information.
The founder of the channel used a profile picture of a man,Terry Davis, who suffered from swastikas and spoke about hearing the voice of God.
End of Wow Mao Zone: A Discord Chat Room Activated on the Leaky Documents in Teixeira’s Legacy
On Discord, users can “boost” channels they manage by making monthly payments, allowing them to get better streaming quality and other perks like access to additional emojis.
CNN has been unable to contact Lucca or establish their identity. CNN spoke with End of Wow Mao Zone members who were hesitant to reveal their identities because of online forums that shroud their identities behind screen names. But End of Wow Mao Zone chatroom members told CNN that Lucca played a key role in propagating the documents that Teixeira allegedly leaked.
Lucca was a “respected user,” one Discord user who said they knew Lucca told CNN in a text conversation, and it was expected that Lucca would take the images down. They did not. Many of the chat rooms are very lightly moderated, and the images stayed up for weeks, according to the four users who spoke to CNN.
After posting the documents, Lucca would add “fresh off the press” or something along those lines, one user added. “He would post them for attention. It was very common for him to ping everyone,” the user said.
Discord and the Pentagon: After the Teixeira Leaked Publication of the Pentagon Intelligence Briefs, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and the 2016 Ukrainian War
Discord is aware of Teixeira’s arrest and has cooperated with US law enforcement on the investigation, a Discord spokesperson told CNN in a statement Thursday night.
Sharing of documents that may be verifiably classified can only be done with the consent of the user according to the terms of service.
The Biden administration has begun to limit the number of people who receive intelligence briefs from the Pentagon, in part due to the questions surrounding why a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman had access to such information.
The leaked documents, which appeared to catch the Biden administration flat-footed, revealed details of the US intelligence collection on allies and a candid US intelligence assessment of the war in Ukraine.
While the suspected leaker has been arrested, the administration’s damage assessment is still ongoing. The extent of the impact of the leaks is not known, even though details from further classified documents continued to be published on Friday, the day after his arrest.
A US official told CNN that the chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff was upset by the leak and worried about national security implications. The Defense Department has been holding daily meetings on the leak since Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first briefed last Thursday.
The disclosure of classified documents in this episode is so egregious that it represents the most egregious disclosure in years. The leaked documents have exposed what officials say are lingering vulnerabilities in the management of government secrets, even after agencies overhauled their computer systems following the 2013 Edward Snowden leak, which revealed the scope of the National Security Agency’s intelligence gathering apparatus.
Sources said that it is unlikely that those safeguards would have stopped the most recent leak. “All classified systems have multiple levels of risk controls, but a determined insider will find the weak points over time,” said a former US official.
The Pentagon and Austin have ordered reviews of access to classified document after the Pentagon took steps to restrict access to sensitive classified material. The US intelligence community failed to discover it’s secrets after they sat on a public internet forum for weeks.
In a statement acknowledging the extent of the problem that the leaks exposed, President Joe Biden said Friday that he had directed both the military and intelligence community to “take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information.”
Chris Krebs, who was the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, said that it was a breakdown. “There’s no question that there will be a lot of introspection inside the intelligence community and across the government of where were those breakdowns? How do we ensure that we tighten that system of military discipline that that was referred to earlier to ensure that these things do not happen?”
“The Government Document is based on sensitive U.S. intelligence, gathered through classified sources and methods, and contains national defense information,” the affidavit states.
The airman, who is assigned to Otis Air National Guard base, was assigned to the 102nd intelligence wing, which is an operational mission that takes in intelligence from a wide range of sources, and packages it into a product for some of the most senior military leaders around the globe.
The official said it was not like a help desk where you would call and get someone to fix your computer. “They’re working on a very highly classified system, so they require that clearance.”
The first few hours were critical: Talking with a US official about a leaker known as Teixeira in the aftermath of the Discord scandal
The photos showed crumpled documents laid on top of magazines and surrounded by other random objects, such as zip-close bags and Gorilla Glue, suggesting they had been hastily folded up and shoved into a pocket before being removed from a secure location.
The Pentagon’s investigation focused on damage from the leaks, and the Justice Department focused on finding the leaker.
Even though Teixeira emerged quickly as the most obvious suspect, counterintelligence agents trained in uncovering foreign spies looked through Teixeira’s background to try to find any sign that he could be working with a foreign intelligence service.
When it comes to cases like the Discord leaks, the “first few hours are critical,” according to a former FBI agent.
In a different scenario, without the intense public attention, agents might have watched him for weeks to see if he was meeting anyone suspicious or if he had accomplices.
Austin and Milley spent time on the phone speaking with US allies and partners around the world regarding the sensitive intelligence and top-secret documents suddenly thrust into the public sphere. Those conversations were expected to continue through the end of the week, another US official said.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was tapped to lead the diplomatic response to the leaked US intelligence documents, according to a US official familiar with the matter.