The FBI filed a criminal complaint against Jack Douglas Teixiera on April 14, 2023 with the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
You can read it here:
https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxlU/rW0LJFqDuks8/v0
Teixiera was arrested that day at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts. You have probably seen the video. Jack is the kid in red shorts. He is 21 and has been a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard since September 2019. Did he even have a driver’s licence when he signed up?
The criminal complaint contains just the bare bones of the government’s case against Teixiera, as it currently stands. More charges may be laid, but he is currently accused of two counts under the US Espionage Act of unlawfully retaining and transmitting classified national defence information. Each count carries a maximum penalty of ten years in jail.
The FBI complaint substantiates media reporting about Teixiera having posted sensitive intelligence materials to a gaming website called “Discord,” where he administered a specific server, “Thug Shaker Central” (you get the drift) that shared this information with other individuals who shared an interest in guns, racist talk and other garbage. The FBI document does not specifically name the website (it’s called “Social Media Platform 1”) nor the specific server (identified only as “Server 1”).
We do learn a few more facts about the case.
One is that Teixiera held the highest security clearance, Top Secret/SCI. SCI refers to “Sensitive compartmented information” which usually contains material derived from specific intelligence collection methodologies, such as signals intelligence or satellite imagery. He was granted this clearance level in 2021, at the ripe age of 19. Why and how he was granted this level of security clearance will be a big question going forward.
The FBI criminal complaint also contends, based on information provided by one of the users of the Discord site, that Teixiera began posting transcripts of classified records in December 2022, but then switched to providing photographs of documents in January 2023. According to the FBI’s investigative source, Teixiera feared being discovered making transcripts of records at his workplace so “he began taking the documents to his residence and photographing them.” Again this lines us with media reporting.
But Teixiera’s fear of discovery at his workplace tells us something else. Which is that the fear was probably misplaced. So far as we know, no one reported anything suspicious about his activities. This is a common problem with insider threat actors, especially in work environments with a lax security culture, an emphasis on trust, and a disinclination to report security breaches for fear of repercussions.
That Teixiera used his family home as his next site for preparing his document leaks raises uncomfortable questions about whether family members also knew or suspected something.
We learn that the FBI was able to make a connection between a highly classified document posted by Teixiera on the Discord site in February 2023 and logs noting documents that Teixiera had personally accessed at his workplace. This particular leaked record also marked the beginning of the downfall of Teixiera’s enterprise, as the document was reposted by the Discord user interviewed by the FBI on the internet, and from there it spread, including to pro-Russian Telegram channels. Soon the story of mysterious leaks on the internet hit the media. By April 6, 2023, the New York Times had printed its first story on the leaks, noting that they contained secret intelligence on the Ukraine war and Ukrainian military capabilities.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/us/politics/ukraine-war-plan-russia.html
But what was the young Air National Guardsman’e enterprise? You won’t find an answer in the FBI criminal complaint—that will have to await the trial, which might be a long way off.
What we know from media investigations into the Discord site suggests that Teixiera falls squarely into an old Cold War schematic about the motivations of leakers and double-agents, the famous “M.I.C.E” taxonomy.
M= money
I = Ideology
C= Corruption (blackmail, sexespionage etc)
and
E = Ego
Teixiera is an E.
There, of course, may be more to the Discord files story, but one pillar will surely be an account of a young man who built a small cult following on a gamer web site by flaunting secrets and claiming great personal knowledge of global events. It impressed the impressionable and bound his followers to him. He may never have intended to have his secret documents revealed beyond this little cabal of the young and clueless. For the purposes of the Espionage Act that doesn't matter. It was willful and reckless behaviour.
The harm that has been done cannot yet be fully accounted. An equally pressing question is whether there will be more Teixieras to come, and not just in the United States. More adolescent IT dudes with a pressing need to use secrets to build personal communities of followers.
A counter-intelligence spotlight may need to be turned on gaming platforms and chat rooms as sites for potential security leaks, with challenging implications for surveillance practices and for privacy rights, as a short essay in on Justsecurity.org, argues:
https://www.justsecurity.org/85991/the-teixeira-disclosures-and-systemic-problems-in-the-u-s-intelligence-community/
The insider threat may also need to be re-calibrated against extremist thinking, which would require a redefining of the “I” for Ideology.
Teixiera appears to fall squarely into an old motivational paradigm, but in the new world of digital data bases, distributed information flows, an inevitable dilution of the old safeguards around a “need to know” principle, widespread IT talent, and easily accessible hacking tools, locking down information presents a formidable challenge.
Ultimately, the prescription might need to be locking down less, by doing a much better job at protecting fewer, really important “secrets.” The alternatives are just not pretty.
does Wesley Wark feel the same way about Daniel Ellsberg , Julian Assange , Edward Snowden or others like them? Any Thoughts about governments lying to their people on important matters!!! This comment was as subservient to government as it gets .. in a typically bland Canadian way.
Thanks Wesley, as a layperson I hadn't heard of the MICE categorization before.