A pilot trained in cybernetic systems, a racist chat room and weapons… This is Jack Teixeira, the leaker of the ‘Pentagon Papers 2.0’.
The Pentagon Papers Leaker may be the title he now holds Jack Teixeirathe 21-year-old who shared in a chat room the official documents that have upset U.S. relations with its allies and exposed weaknesses in the Ukrainian military.
Teixeira has been described as a reclusive, gun-loving young man who ran a chat room in which interacted more than 20 people on Discord, a platform he used with other people he had initially met through video games. Most of the the members of the groupcalled Thug Shaker Centralwere young men and teenagers who shared a fondness for guns and racist memes, according to U.S. media reports.
A member of Thug Shaker Central has secured The New York Times that the documents were intended to inform the group and were not to be shared beyond this virtual space, suggesting that someone other than Teixeira could have posted the documents elsewhere.
Members of the chat, initially contacted by the media, refused to reveal the identity of the leaker.who called himself ‘OG’. The Discord chat room disappeared from the Internet after news of the leaks broke last week.
Discord users subsequently posted some of the documents on another invitation-only server. Some thought the documents were fake because they didn’t think anyone would be brazen enough to post them online, according to a review of posts on the platform by CNN.
Teixeira was a young aviator who was working at the Air National Guard base in Massachusetts, where he had access to the documents, according to the Washington Post. He joined the service in September 2019 and had recently been promoted to aeronautical officer First Class, according to a 102nd Intelligence Wing Facebook post.
The leaker was formed as specialists in cybernetic transportation systems. and his job was to make sure the service’s “large global communications network” was functioning properly. Teixeira had been assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing, headquartered at Otis Air National Guard Base, Joint Base Cape Cod, eastern Massachusetts, according to The New York Times.
Although he lived in the North Dighton region, he had grown up in the neighboring state of Rhode Island. In the media sweep of his social networks, messages from his mother were found, which show that he was proud of her son’s military career.
He knew what he was leaking
Teixeira, who was the eldest in Discord’s group, would have been explaining to the other members the meaning of the military jargon in the documentsThe Washington Post, which spoke to one of the members of the group, reportedly boasted that he was revealing things that “the government doesn’t want known,” according to an investigation by The Washington Post, which spoke to one of the group’s members.
This source has also claimed that he did not send anything by mistake, that he knew for certain what he was doing. On one occasion, he has revealed, the alleged author even became angry with the other members of the group, as he had spent “an hour every day writing these very long messages in which he often made notes and explanations of things that we normal citizens would not understand,” complaining about the apparent lack of interest on the part of younger people.threatening to stop sending leaks.
In mid-March, the alleged leaker stopped posting documents, and a day before the first U.S. media outlet reported the alleged leak, he wrote in the group in a “frantic” state, asserting that “something had happened, and he prayed to god that this did not happen.“.
After the case jumped into the media, the group members jumped to another server to continue their conversations, in which the alleged leaker confessed to feeling “confused and lost about what to do next.” He finally asked the other members of the group to delete all the documents and all messages and it disappeared.
