(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/world/europe/jack-teixeira-pentagon-leak.html)

[...]
In interviews, members of Thug Shaker Central said their group had started out as a place where young men and teenage boys could gather amid the isolation of the pandemic to bond over their love of guns, share memes — sometimes racist ones — and play war-themed video games.

But Airman Teixeira, who one member of the group called O.G. and was also its unofficial leader, wanted to teach the young acolytes who gravitated to him about actual war, members said.

And so, beginning in at least October, Airman Teixeira, who was attached to the Guard’s intelligence unit, began sharing descriptions of classified information, group members and law enforcement officials said, eventually uploading hundreds of pages of documents, including detailed battlefield maps from Ukraine and confidential assessments of Russia’s war machine.

His goal, group members said, was both to inform and impress.

Airman Teixeira’s access to secret information and his ability to know about major global events before they appeared on front pages stoked the curiosity of the group, which numbered 20 to 30 people.

“Everyone respected O.G.,” Vahki said in an interview. “He was the man, the myth. And he was the legend. Everyone respected this guy.”

[...]

The extent of the damage caused by the leak is not yet fully known.

The materials Airman Teixeira is accused of sharing revealed how deeply the Russian government had been penetrated by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies, which gained the ability to provide near-real-time information to the Ukrainians about planned Russian strikes.

They also showed that America’s spy services were eavesdropping on allies like Israel and South Korea, as well as the Ukrainian leadership, embarrassing revelations that could erode trust at a time when Washington was trying to present a unified front in the conflict with Moscow.

[...]

It started as long daily memos with complicated and, at times, confusing summaries of international events that members of the group found difficult to follow. Sometimes he would admonish his younger friends for not taking the information seriously, Vahki said.

Around October last year, his frustration led him to start posting original documents, including detailed battle maps from the war in Ukraine marked “TOP SECRET.” From October to March, Vahki said, the airman posted about 350 documents to the group.

The documents might have remained confined to Thug Shaker Central were it not for a member of the group named Lucca, a 17-year-old from California, who might not have fully grasped the gravity of the documents he had been given access to.

On March 2, Lucca was involved in a conversation about the Ukraine war in a public Discord group called #War-Posting when he published several dozen documents from the cache that had been uploaded to Thug Shaker Central.

For a month, the documents bounced around esoteric chat groups, including one popular with players of the online game Minecraft and another for fans of a moderately popular British YouTuber. They went seemingly unnoticed by anyone who understood their importance until early April, when some of the documents began appearing on the Telegram messaging app channels of supporters of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

As the news began to spread, Airman Teixeira started closing down his online accounts and bidding farewell to online friends.

“He was very freaked out,” Vahki said. “This isn’t something like an ‘oopsie-daisy — I’m going to be reprimanded.’ This is life-in-prison type stuff.”

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/13/jack-teixeira-discord-document-leak/)

[...]
While Teixeira was relatively inexperienced in the military, he had access to highly classified military intelligence through a Defense Department computer network known as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, said a U.S. official familiar with the matter. The system would have allowed Teixeira to read and potentially print classified documents, though there are guidelines to handle those in accordance with the law.

Teixeira was mobilized for federal active duty last fall, said Nahaku McFadden, a spokesperson for the National Guard Bureau. It is not uncommon for troops in the National Guard to receive such orders to fill the need for specialized jobs, but since he was on active duty at the time of the alleged disclosures, he is subject to additional punishment under the military justice system.

One friend described Teixeira in an interview as patriotic, a devout Catholic and a libertarian with an interest in guns and doubts about America’s future. The friend said he met Teixeira before 2020 on a Discord server mainly focused on guns and libertarian politics, and bonded over their shared interest in Glock handguns and Catholicism.

Later, the friend joined a new Discord server that Teixeira started called Thug Shaker Central, which became home to a group of about two dozen people, including many teenagers. Teixeira was a “pretty normal guy” outside the server, said the friend, who eventually met Teixeira in person. He had a “slight temper” and was “more of a mentor than a leader.”

The friend recalled that Teixeira started sharing classified documents on the Discord server last year, during the war in Ukraine, which he saw as a “depressing” battle between “two countries that should have more in common than keeping them apart.” Sharing the classified documents was meant “to educate people who he thought were his friends and could be trusted” free from the propaganda swirling outside, the friend said. The men and boys on the server agreed never to share the documents outside the server, since they might harm U.S. interests.

“I was of the opinion that some of these kids were prone to run their mouths because they spent too much time online, but I was ignored,” said the friend, who added that he tried to stay out of such discussions. “It was pretty obnoxious to see kids who grew up in the suburbs argue about a conflict an ocean away.”

Around half of the server’s members were “kids in their basements” playing video games, while the other half were gun enthusiasts, the friend said. Recent claims by others who were on the server that some of its members were Russian and Ukrainian were “pure fabrication,” the friend said. One member pretending to be a Russian naval officer actually lived in Kentucky, he said, and was kicked out.

“It was only supposed to be keeping kids informed about real-world issues,” the friend said.

[...]

Other members of Teixeira’s server have showed The Post video of Teixeira shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle and said he referenced government raids at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and in Waco, Tex. — events with deep resonance among right-wing, anti-government extremists. The name of the Discord server itself derives from a meme taken from a gay porn video often used for its shock value and laughs, the members said.

Regarding the racist and antisemitic jokes reportedly shared on the server, the friend said it was hard to assess Teixeira’s true feelings given “how many layers of irony that server was in.” Dark jokes got more laughs, he said. But Teixeira was a “pretty basic-brand Catholic who was into guns,” the friend said.

“He’s a good person that trusted the wrong people, in my opinion,” the friend said. He said Teixeira would remain his friend and that he hoped to reschedule a hiking trip they had planned together.

[...]

A profile for Teixeira on Steam, another online site popular with gamers, includes a profile image of a man holding a rifle that crops out the head. Teixeira used the handle “TheExcaliburEffect” on the site, and featured a famous but unattributed quote:

“Beware the quiet man. For while others speak, he watched. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest … he strikes.”

EDIT: Lowenz, your posts would be a LOT more impactful if you dropped all the formatting, bold, italics and underlines. You over do it so much I just can't take anything you write seriously, so it has the opposite effect that you think it does.