RANEY ARONSON-RATH:In April of last year, a huge leak of classified documents began making headlines
NEWS ARCHIVE 1: Top secret documents about the war in Ukraine have appeared on social media…
NEWS ARCHIVE 2: Investigations are underway into the leak of classified Pentagon documents…
NEWS ARCHIVE 3: … the worst leak of US national security intelligence in many years
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:The source of the leak was a young Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira. In March, he pled guilty to sharing intelligence secrets on Discord, the popular chat platform.
JEREMIAH: He kept posting and posting and posting…
SHANE HARRIS: He’s working in this highly sensitive facility… and then he goes home and hops onto Discord and it’s a racist, paranoid, antisemitic, free-for-all.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Washington Post reporters Shane Harris and Sam Oakford have been covering the story from the start. And they collaborated with FRONTLINE on the documentary, The Discord Leaks.
SAM OAKFORD: We were talking to the people who did know who was leaking it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:I spoke to them about their reporting, and the latest developments in the story - along with our director, Tom Jennings. I'm Raney Aronson-Rath, Editor in Chief and Executive Producer of Frontline, and this is the Frontline Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:So Shane, Sam, and Tom, thanks so much for joining me on The Dispatch.
SHANE HARRIS: Great to be here.
SAM OAKFORD: Thanks, Raney.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:So I want to start with the leaks in 2022. Shane, as a longtime national security reporter, tell me about what it was like then and what was in those leaks.
SHANE HARRIS: I think that, speaking for myself, and probably Sam feels this way too, when we first saw the leaks that were coming across, um, it was pretty amazing to actually see these highly classified documents, uh, you know, showing in great detail things about the war in Ukraine, activities in China, North Korea. I mean, it was immediately clear that we had kind of hit a motherlode of really big intelligence information, um, and you don't really come across that all that often, and certainly not under the circumstances that we'd seen it here, where it was being shared on the Discord platform. Um, so, as a journalist, it was actually pretty thrilling to come across that information the way that we did.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:And Sam, just you’re, you’re understanding, the sort of gravity of this. What are you thinking?
SAM OAKFORD: Well, my background is, you know, pretty different than Shane's, so I hadn't reported on a big intelligence leak before, and in some ways I think it might have been helpful because I was focused initially a lot on where it was coming from and didn't have time almost to register just how insane it was that there were hundreds of documents that Shane just described. So, but then, you know, then we joined up and we appreciated that together.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Before the world knew who Jack was, Sam, you were talking to people who did know him. What was that kind of tenor of the conversation you were hearing about who he was? What are some of the first things you heard about?
SAM OAKFORD: We heard from people who knew him on Discord, and they were pretty clear that he was somewhat involved in some way with the military, right? So I remember early on, we were trying to figure out if he was a contractor, someone like that, uh, like Snowden, who might have had access to material that way, or if he was really, you know, wearing fatigues, right, and going somewhere, maybe even if he was overseas. Um, and we got the impression that he was, uh, someone who was young, someone who spent a lot of time online, but was in the military. So, it ended up kind of matching what we ultimately learned about him.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Yeah, and Sam, when you were thinking about how you talked to them, a lot of this was confidential. What were the conversations you and Shane were having about confidentiality and how you could protect people as they were talking to you?
SAM OAKFORD: That was always something we discussed, you know, immediately at the outset of these conversations because they were so sensitive, right? I remember early on, uh, when we were doing this reporting, we expected the, the FBI to show up at any point. You'll recall that there was this week, right, where, where this was in the news, but no one had, had figured out exactly who was leaking it, but we were talking to the people who did know who was leaking it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:And Shane, you're so experienced in this area, but this is so particular. It's younger people.
SHANE HARRIS: Yeah, that was really one of the key differences here as opposed to so many, you know, leaks for national security stories. I've reported on many of these kids were, they were kids. I mean, they were, they were under 18. In some cases we had to get parental permission to speak with them. Um, so that in and of itself was very different from most of the work that I do. But what was also, I think, impressive, Sam and I, is the more we talked to people who had spent time with Jack online, the more we really understood that he spent so much of his life online. And that these relationships that he had formed with other young people in Discord were kind of like the foundation of his social life. They were his, his friends, even though many of them had never met in person. And so, we were able to really start fleshing out Jack as a person and not just as this kind of, you know, shadowy figure that had leaked all of this classified information.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:So Tom, you enter in as the filmmaker here. I know we had so many conversations, you and I, about how, how do you make something like this into a documentary, right? It's very hard to do any type of national security reporting, in our form, in the documentary form, so talk to me about that and that process for you.
TOM JENNINGS: We started out, uh, immediately meeting with Sam and Shane, getting deeply involved in their reporting process. And as a collective, we early on decided that there were two essential strands of reporting for the film that we had to follow. One was, uh, national security realm, the security access. Like what, how did Jack do what he did? How did he get access to where he went. The other side was Discord, this forum. And speaking just for myself, I knew very little about Discord itself. Um, but those were the two areas. And we relied on Sam very strongly for Discord element, and Shane, given his background, very much for the national security part of it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:I really put this out to all of you. What made the Discord platform a place in which this could flourish and these conversations could happen, and the ultimate leak?
SAM OAKFORD: Um, Discord is a pretty good product, actually. It's something that does what it sets out to do. It has these, um, you know, what are called servers, right? Um, which essentially are housed on a big server that Discord owns. So it's a little different than what old school computer people might think of. Um, but it gives you an impression that it's, um, That it's a kind of a private space, right? And that's predominantly the way people experience Discord. And, you know, you might guess that it could lead to certain behaviors, right? Good and bad. It encourages people to have that sense of privacy, security, feeling like they're talking to their friends. And that's the marketing that the company uses to push it. And in this case, I think it gave Teixeira a place where he felt comfortable, you know, talking to people at all, all hours. These kids would describe, you know, using video chat, using text chat, basically being tethered to this platform in this community. Um, and you know, we have to talk about the pandemic here in the role that it played in, in pushing people onto discord. So that's kind of the setting. That's what sets up this story where, when he ultimately then leaks.
SHANE HARRIS: Yeah, and just to expand upon what, what Sam said about the pandemic, one reason that Discord was really, um, a lifeline or, you know, a harbor for a lot of these kids was because they weren't in school. Their schools were closed. You know, social distancing restrictions, which we all remember, kept them from hanging out with their local friends, their in-real-life friends.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Right, right.
SHANE HARRIS: So Discord became the gathering point. And I think that it really impressed upon us that the pandemic was so key to this story because it made them all kind of collect and concentrate on this Discord platform. And I think that plus the sort of the nature of being online and having a bit more anonymity where you say things you might not ordinarily say to people, to their face, kind of all snowballed into this uh, culture, where they were, you know, sharing classified documents, they were making horrible jokes, they were, you know, doing things that probably, I wondered often that, you know, if they were in an in-real life environment, would they think twice about the things that they were saying or doing?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Yeah. I mean, and one of the things that I found the most interesting in the reporting that you all did is that, that line between, the sort of joking, right, that they think is a joke to actual, you know, very harmful language that was racist. And then there's, of course, the decision to, um, share classified documents, right? Jack just pled guilty, um, but what do we know about the motivation behind sharing? His motivation?
SHANE HARRIS: Jack was somebody who from a really young age, we found in talking to friends, you know, enjoyed demonstrating how much he knew about a subject, you know, military history, or the history of weaponry, or the specifics of, you know, tanks and guns. These were things that he really kind of, he geeked out on. And once he started getting access to classified information about current events, particularly the war in Ukraine, that was a big one, we found that he really seemed to want to impress these young people with all of the things that he knew that ordinary people did not. That he wanted to show them that he knew things that were happening, you know, in the secret realm. He had access to classified information. And it was kind of a flex, I think, for him to kind of, you know, to, to prove to people that he really knew what he was talking about when he would expound upon world events, as he often did. And it's interesting, I mean, they're, you know, one of the motivations often for people to leak is because they want to demonstrate some kind of authority or knowledge about a subject. But it's often because they want to, you know, expose what they think is some kind of wrongdoing or maybe a misguided policy that they don't agree with. I'd never encountered somebody who was leaking documents essentially to impress a bunch of his teenage friends, um, but that really does seem to be at what was at the core of Jack's motivation. A big part of it was showing off.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Tom, so you, you did a really great job, I think in the film of showing this culture. How did you get inside that world so that we would understand it better? Those of us who are not teenagers on Discord.
TOM JENNINGS: Well, it is kind of like, um, an alien culture to people our age, really my age. I should speak for myself, but there are, there are a lot of ways that we got into it. Uh, the first thing I would say is that the family really shut off. We couldn't get access. And so we decided fairly early on that it was, there was this other family that existed online. There were the people who Jack shared his world with on Discord. And so they kind of became our stand in for the family and a way to get inside his head. And in many ways, I think that they were actually even more instrumental and gave us a Bigger lens, a more focused lens on his thinking and his brain. Um, so we went about trying to get access to those folks, to the people, the kids, really the young people who were, uh, online with Jack and that became a process that was, uh, piecemeal. It was following, uh, threads that really were first pulled by, uh, Chris Dehghanpoor and Sam and Shane at The Post. Uh, they really kind of found online ways to, to get access to these folks. And it was a month long process, slowly, slowly getting into their lives, contacting them first anonymously. Uh, online and then, you know, with more direct contacts and then inevitably what we needed really was in person contacts to put people on camera. It was just a very long, arduous process that, you know, what documentary filmmaking really does pretty well. We have the time and the ability to do that.
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RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Let’s talk about the reporting that you did just a few weeks ago. You both reported on another leak on Discord, allegedly from another member of the armed forces, this time an Air Force intelligence analyst named Jason Gray. You wrote that Gray's case bears striking similarities to the story that we tell in our documentary. So, can you both tell me more about what you've learned? Um, and Sam, again, I'll start with you.
SAM OAKFORD: Well, I think that there's a lot of parallels there and you can kind of break them down, right? You can talk about the time period. There's an overlap here. Uh, when, Gray was, you know, on Discord and He was into guns, um, in a way that maybe is a little bit different than the average gun owner is. He was putting what appeared to be silencers on his weapons. He was posting images on Discord, um, showing, uh, him with firearms. And that's something that we know Jack also did. In fact, we, we obtained video that showed Jack doing this and then sharing it on Discord.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:That’s very vivid. Very vivid.
SAM OAKFORD: Yeah, and including a video of him saying racist, uh, and, uh, anti semitic things before firing a weapon. So just in terms of their use of discord, uh, at a certain period, um, when they were, uh, without a lot of other social, uh, avenues. That's a starting parallel. Maybe Shane can talk about the other ones.
SHANE HARRIS: Yeah, like Jack, um, this Jason Gray person worked in an intelligence facility. He had access to classified information. Um, what we learned was that the government was investigating him initially because they suspected that he had ties to extremist groups, and that he was in particular either a sympathizer or supporter with this group called the Boogaloo, which is essentially an extremist group that is anticipating, you know, a second civil war and is, you know, an anti-government group. Um, and as they started looking into him, what they found on his Discord page according to an FBI affidavit or his discord account was it looked like he was sharing some kind of a classified image or document with friends on Discord who were aligned with this Boogaloo group. Um, now what we've subsequently learned afterwards is that the, the document in question was actually a picture. And while they eventually determined that the image itself, and it's not clear if he took it or not, was technically not a classified document. It is a piece of highly sensitive information that this person was sharing from the base with these other, you know, people on Discord. Um, the, the kind of the threads that the government started pulling when they got into this are what ultimately led to them finding out that he had also been sharing and distributing a huge amount of child pornography, which was ultimately a set of charges that he pleaded guilty to. So, it's another one of these ways in which once the government kind of went down the rabbit hole of his Discord account, they found all of these other troubling instances of, you know, extremist group alignments sharing this highly sensitive information with people who shouldn't see it. You know, and ultimately the charges that he pleaded guilty to on, you know, uh, uh, you know, videos that were horribly graphic and exploitative of children.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:So, I guess I have to ask you, Shane, as a national security reporter, is your work changing? Is this changing the nature of what you are reporting on? I mean, this is just really, you know, revelatory stuff.
SHANE HARRIS: Yeah, I think it is changing a lot. I mean, I think that, you know, you know, as I said a few months ago, I'd never experienced someone who was leaking to impress, you know, his teenage friends. But I think that what we're seeing here is kind of many the way that a lot of these leaks are going to go in the future because there are just so many people who have access to classified information. And as we've seen time and time again, there really aren't that many practical obstacles to keeping them from releasing it. You know, I can remember a conversation I had a number of years ago with somebody who had recently left one of the intelligence agencies, who said something at the time to me sounded so kind of fantastical. He said, you know, one of the things that we're worried about is that as gaming platforms become more popular, foreign intelligence services like the Russians or China's intelligence service are gonna start scoping out for potential leakers and recruits on gaming platforms. Like, try and find the person who's playing a game not far from NSA headquarters and maybe start talking to them and ask them where they work and do you see anything interesting at work. And I thought at the time like, wow, that's, that's kind of a really kind of futuristic scenario. Like, huh, I wonder if things really will play out that way. Well, in Jack's case, he wasn't recruited by a foreign intelligence agency, but you could absolutely see, uh, Both how he could and the ways in which kind of like the vector, the behavior path of leaking that that official was describing years ago ultimately came true with Jack Teixeira.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Well, I mean, it just, as you were speaking, Shane, I was thinking, I hope you stay in this space and keep reporting those types of stories and, and the sort of gravity of all of this.so let's talk about Discord. Uh, we spoke to a discord executive in our film, but what, what have you been hearing in general, the Discord side of this? What are they saying?
SAM OAKFORD: In terms of what Discord has said, uh, they've made the point that they can't know what classified material is, right? Because of its very nature, but I think something that we got at hopefully in the in the documentary and in our reporting is that there's certain trade-offs that they're very open about on their platform and that they are essentially comfortable with, uh, effectively, uh, little or no, uh, monitoring of what happens across swaths. In fact, the majority of, when you look at, like, kind of the activity that's actually taking place, it's, it's not monitored, uh, by and large except for very narrow, uh, things like CSAM. Um, so, so that's just something they're, they're open about, and, and they didn't really, uh, feel that, that had to change based on this case.
SHANE HARRIS: Yeah and I would say too that they, you know, they, Discord knows that its platform is very attractive to extremist groups. You know, the Charlottesville rally in 2017 for Unite the Right organized on Discord. They know this. And, and I think, you know, to their credit, they are, they're trying to take steps to, to combat it, but practically speaking, as Sam has described the way the system is set up, the platform is set up, you know, they're not really positioned to be able to monitor for people, you know, sharing, you know, racist rhetoric for people organizing in this way. And as they pointed out to us time and time again, look, it's up to the government to tell us what's a classified document. We don't know what a classified document is. Um, but, you know, it's pretty clear that the company understands that they have these problems. And, you know, it's kind of you know, it's built into their business in the sense that this platform is attractive precisely because it offers so much privacy and virtual anonymity.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Right. So let's now talk about the Air Force and the accountability there in terms of how this could have happened. Um, and also, you know, of course, they released a big report on the incident as well.
SHANE HARRIS: Yeah, the Air Force Inspector General did an investigation at Otis International Guard Base, which is the base that Jack worked, and he worked in an intelligence organization there, inside a secure facility, it’s not called -- it's called a skiff. Um, this report was blistering. There's really no other way around it. Um, what they documented and, you know, having reported on national security for 25 years now, I have to agree with their findings was basically a total breakdown in the way that you are supposed to secure classified information, the rules for handling it, who gets to see it. Um, at the, at the bottom line of it is that Jack had no business given his job as a computer tech, uh, you know, support worker, looking at these classified documents that were contained on the computers and the networks that he was helping to maintain. And what was really stunning to us, I think, was what we learned that, he had been spotted on different occasions looking at classified documents, taking notes on them in some cases, all things that were just gigantic red flags. Yeah. And he was never pulled off the line. He was never relieved of his duties. He wasn't reprimanded. And the Air Force inspector general essentially points to that and says, you know, you can almost see them sort of like throwing their hands up at this and saying, why in the world was this young man never reported? The commander of the intelligence wing at the base was relieved of his command. Um, there was other disciplinary action that was taken. Um, I came away from that investigation thinking, I don't believe for one second that these kinds of lapses are unique to this one base because when people explained, you know, for instance, why they didn't report Jack to security authorities. They said, well, we didn't want to get him in trouble or, you know, the security guys come in and it's a whole process and they start poking around and, you know, it's a really onerous thing. Well, that's going to be true at any other place, I suspect too. So, I came away from that investigation thinking, you know, I doubt that Otis is alone and having such lax standards, uh, and, and even, you know, in, in many cases, like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how you're supposed to handle classified secrets.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Right. That has a lot of grave indications in it. Tom, when you think about the end of the documentary, right, the question of what's going to happen from here? Jack pled guilty. Where do you think the story goes from here, Tom?
TOM JENNINGS: Just to echo what Shane just said, I think there's going to be many more similar circumstances that are going to happen. I don't think this is a one-off case at all. With regard to, to Jack himself, um, he's, he's going to be sentenced in the coming months. 11 years potentially, uh, he could get in prison. And going to be, uh, I think kind of a cause celebre for the military. I'm, I'm curious myself to understand, to know what the ripples are there, what has happened in the military and the security clearance process, which I think we fairly well indicted, uh, in this film and in the reporting as being lax. Um, I'm very curious to know what happens next with the Pentagon and how they go about recruiting.
SHANE HARRIS: I mean, what Jack's case shows is this huge vulnerability at the heart of the intelligence apparatus, of an insufficient system for vetting people, and a system that's built so that people can get access to secrets and share them with practically whomever they want. And I think that is going to be a major challenge for the military and the intelligence agencies going forward and is really not something that they're fundamentally built to address right now. So that's going to be a really big part of the, the terrain that I cover, uh, for the next several years, I think.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Sam and Shane and Tom, thank you. I predict that we will be continuing this work together. You know, there's already been another leak and it seems like this is just the tip of the iceberg. So I appreciate your work and, and thanks for being on the Dispatch.
SHANE HARRIS: Thanks a lot.
SAM OAKFORD: Thanks.
TOM JENNINGS: Thank you.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:Thanks again to Shane Harris, Sam Oakford, and Tom Jennings for joining me on The Dispatch. You can watch the Discord leaks on Frontline dot org, Frontline's YouTube channel, and the PBS app. Thanks for listening.
