Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira. NBC News/Facebook photo.
A 21 year old Air Force reserve Airman First Class was arrested by the FBI for leaking classified documents on Discord. NBC News. Jack Teixeira was taken into custody by the FBI without incident. Teixeira was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis National Guard Base. The leaks caused a massive panic at the Pentagon as the information released, mostly about the Ukraine war, but including other sensitive secrets as well, was hugely embarrassing to the government. Teixeira released the information on the chat platform Discord. According to other members of the Discord chat he released the information to win arguments about Ukraine and to impress other members of the chat. The leaks had been occurring since January but went viral after the leaks spread to other websites like Telegram and 4chan.
My Comment:
This is still hugely embarrassing for the Pentagon and I am assuming that Teixeira is going to get the book thrown at him. His leaks not only embarrassed them, it also embarrassed many of our allies (and "allies") including South Korea, Ukraine and others. He also exposed a lot of the lies about the Ukraine War which the powers that be are going to consider unforgivable.
What gets me is the fact that he did this for no real reason. He wasn't a principled leaker like Edward Snowden who thought he was doing the right thing. He wasn't a fool like Reality Winner who was warped by Trump Derangement Syndrome. He was just a guy in a gaming discord that wanted to impress his friends and win arguments. And now his life is completely over.
Supposedly it was the interview with the Washington Post that broke the case open, which is pretty embarrassing for the FBI. They had interviewed someone that was in the Discord group and that apparently broke things open.
I think it's pretty obvious that the leaks are legit. That doesn't mean that they are all true though. I for one don't believe the casualty figures that they released, but I think they do believe it. Ukraine has been an intelligence failure from the start, so there are parts of the leaks I am questionable on. But regardless, it's clear that these leaks are at least mostly legit now.
I do worry that this could lead to more censorship. I wouldn't care too much about Discord, but did you notice in the NBC report that they tried to blame this on 4chan? Sure, people posted the leaks there but they did on Twitter and Telegram as well, but you don't see them getting labeled like 4chan was. And given the powers that be are going to want to prevent this from happening again, I worry that some of these websites might be attacked. Indeed, I am worried that the other members of this Discord group could be in trouble as well, even though they had no responsibility to keep the documents secret.
I know some people are questioning this arrest, but I don't really think this was some kind of false flag. The information that was released was too damaging for that. If this was some kind of intel op it wouldn't have involved all the embarrassing secrets released. The one I wrote about earlier in the week about Russia being able to jam our GPS weapons alone is so damaging that I can't imagine the Pentagon ever releasing it.
As for Teixeira himself, I have little sympathy. If he had done this for some political purpose I would have been impressed as some of the information he released was very valuable for me and might cause a quicker end to the Ukraine War. But his motives, assuming the Discord witness was right, was so stupid that I can't really feel sorry for him. He ruined his life for no greater cause then himself...
No comments:
Post a Comment