Of Us National Security intelligence in many years. Narrator a special investigation with the Washington Post. the 22yearold pleaded guilty to charges. Jack teixeira could face sixteen years for releasing secret military documents online. Talking to jacks friends the internet was a huge part of his life. Hes working in this highly sensitive facility, safeguarding the nations secrets, and then he goes hops onto discord and its a racist, paranoid, antisemitic, free for all. Its like hes living this double life. Narrator the chat platform. This was a problematic pocket on our service. We dont want these people on discord. Narrator and the National Security failures. Should the military vetting process have caught all of these aspects of his personality . The vetting system is pretty robust, but its not perfect. There were countless missed opportunities, and as a result, we have one of the worst leak cases in modern times. Narrator now on frontline, the discord leaks. Frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. And by the corporation for public broadcasting. Additional support is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More at macfound. Org. The heisingsimons foundation, unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities. At hsfoundation. Org. And by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler, and Additional Support from koo and patricia yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. And from the fredric j. Ridel living trust. mouse clicks narrator it started on the online chat platform discord a post by a person known only as lucca. mouse clicking, computer pings classified u. S. Intelligence documents, one batch after another. clicking, pinging documents labeled top secret soon spilled onto social media. Thats when it made headlines. Top secret documents about the war in ukraine investigations are underway into the leak have appeared on social media. Of classified pentagon documents. The pentagon is dealing with the fallout from the worst leak of u. S. National Security Intelligence in many years. Top secret documents show ukraines air defense vulnerability. After this hit the news, were trying to figure out a the extent of the leak; and b obviously, who leaked it. computer pinging we were looking into lucca, trying to find traces of him across the web. Narrator sam oakford is on the visual Forensics Team at the Washington Post. message sent sounds i got in touch with someone else in this discord server, and we had a video call. mouse clicks voice filtered he was clear that lucca was not the originator of these leaked documents. voice filtered he showed me what he said were additional documents that hadnt been in the tranche that lucca was tied to. Narrator shane harris is a National Security reporter at the post. Sam sends me a picture that this source has taken of a document and shared with sam. Oh wow, okay. Its the chinese spy balloon that had, some months earlier, drifted over north america, and this appears to be a picture taken from above the spy balloon, which means it could only come from a government surveillance platform. I thought, how does a teenager have access to highly classified documents . Narrator a few hours later, the source called back. This is a recording from a call i had that night. voice filtered and thats. When this story started. Narrator the reporters arranged to meet the source in person. car door shuts were sitting on this park bench, and this kid arrives, and before weve even had a chance to start introducing ourselves to each other, he says. So, i have this information, and i want to give it to you. He pops open the laptop, and its pretty clear within a minute or two that this kid has an astonishing range of classified documents. Narrator the leak was far bigger than anyone had understood more than 300 pages that included some of the most highly classified information in the u. S. Government from secret pentagon assessments of the war in ukraine, to revelations about Irans Nuclear program, to scenarios about a possible chinese invasion of taiwan. And thats when he starts to tell us the story of a group of friends who he made online during the pandemic in a discord server that they called thug Shaker Central. And he described one individual, who, over the course of many months, had shared hundreds and hundreds of classified documents. Narrator as the reporters were returning home with the documents. The fbi was closing in on a suspect. Elicopter blades churning Jack Teixeira. Jack douglas teixeira. Jack teixeira. The man suspected of leaking highly classified military documen has been found. Thats him in the red shorts there. The 21yearold Massachusetts AirNational Guard member was takeinto custody earlier today. helicopter blades churning this 21yearold Air National Guard member is alleged to have disclosed hundreds of topsecret government documents online to his gaming buddies. Why did he do it . How did he do it . What drove him . Who is he . Narrator over the next six months, reporters at the Washington Post would investigate Jack Teixeiras world. It largely played out online. Our whole team was working on this, creating networks, basically, of people, based their social media profiles, because they interacted in some way with jack or someone he was connected to. Narrator Chris Dehghanpoor specializes in tracking down sources online. He worked as an Information Security engineer at a Gaming Platform before becoming an Investigative Reporter at the post. The first thing i tried to do was to find a steam profile. Steam is an Online Gaming network that is very popular with users on discord, and if we could find his friend list, we could start to kind of build out a network of other users that he was interacting with. Heres a list of peoe that both jack and mr. Lucca were friends with. Out of the many friend requests at i sent out, only a handful actually responded. One of those happened to be the user that is ned crow. After about a half hour of going back and forth, they revealed that they had dated. For me, that definitely set alarm bells off. What are the odds of, you know, one of the first people that kind of replies to my random friend request, the day of, happens to be someone that dated jack . It seemed astronomical that that was actually happening. Narrator but her story checked out. In a series of contacts with crow, the post reporters began to find out more about her and her relationship with Jack Teixeira. They met online. They were very close during the pandemic. I get the feeling that when shes telling this story about jack, shes speaking as somebody who also went down some very deep rabbit holes and went to some very dark places. She became a neonazi because of people she met online. She wants to tell her story as somebody saying, look, i made bad choices in my life. Narrator she agreed to go on camera if we used her online name and her whole face wasnt shown. She said sheo longer has anything to do with the neonazi movement. No, i dont believe any of that anymore. I realized as time went on that those views were just inherently false, but before then, i realized that it was potentially going to get me killed to stay in those communities. Is that fear the reason that you dont want to be identified in this interview . Partially, yeah. I dont think anyone would seek me out to hurt me, but its better to be safe than sorry. Narrator crow says she met Jack Teixeira online. I think the first time i remember encountering him, we were on a server about guns and gear, and, like, russian stuff. And i think i asked him some questions about what he was talking about, because, as much as i like guns, i dont know as much as some of these people, and it got to a point where, like, i trusted him quite a bit. And what were some of his, just, general political views of the day . He was patriotic, he liked america. Um. I guess. The best way i could possibly describe him would be kind of like a libertarian. He had strong opinions about everything. He was not a neonazi. But definitely conservative, really supported, like, gun rights, First Amendment rights. Okay. So it was definitely a plus to me that he was fine with my beliefs. He texted me this big, long, emotional thing asking me to date him. Telling me that i was, like, the last part of this dystopian world that he liked. Um. He knew everything about my life. Narrator crow says they never met in person, but they had an online relationship for about a year. I think in front of his friends, he kind of put on this front of oh, i dont really care. Way more typically masculine and conservative. I think he wanted them to think of him pretty, like, highly. But when youre oneonone with him, he was. Much more of a genuinely, like, sweet person. He loved dragons and dinosaurs and stuff. Since he was a kid, he always wanted to ride a dragon. And looking back on it, like, its kind of childish, but, you know, that was a side of him you never really saw when you were talking to him. Narrator Jack Teixeiras family would not speak on the record, but the post reporters were able to piece together an outline of his childhood. Teixeira grew up in dighton, massachusetts, a tranquil corner of the state. camera clicking you see family photos of him when hes little. He looks just like a typical ordinary little kid. He seems to come from a big family. Here he is playing a game online. He looks about six years old in this picture. He was obsessed as a young kid with military weaponry and hardware and world war ii airplanes. He was a bright kid by all accounts. In middle school, he made the honor roll. We understand hes reasonably close to his parents. He lives at the home of his mother and stepfather, but hes also close with his dad. We know that in middle school, he started playing call of duty and grand theft auto with friends online. He gets to high school, and it seems like maybe this is a period where theres some significant change in his life and starts to have problems. Narrator it was a time that he would still talk about when he began dating crow after high school. There were many late night calls where he would rant to me about school. How much he hated his teacher and how much he hated some people, and he hated the principal, and how he wishes he couldve shot up the school, um, how he should have done it. Just stuff like that. His sophomore year, there is an incident at the school where there are two students who say that jack tells them he has a molotov cocktail in his backpack, and what would they do if he threw one down the hallway . The kids are alarmed. They go to officials, and ultimately the Dighton PoliceDepartment Investigates this. Narrator frontline and the Washington Post obtained the report of the Subsequent Police investigation. There are witness statements that a number of the students give that document all of these things that they said that theyve heard jack say. papers shifting including the threats that hes made about killing black people. The police meet with jack, and he tries to say i was just talking about a video game. Ultimately, jack is suspended from school for one day and required to take a psychological Risk Assessment before returning to class. We wanted to build a place where you could game, talk, and ultimately belong. So we built discord, and you loved it. Narrator by the time teixeira got into trouble in high school, the chat platform discord was surging in popularity with gamers. You made discord into a home, a place for you and your friends to hang out in. Narrator discord was started in 2015 by Game Developers jason citron and stanislav vishnevskiy. We came up with this idea of what if we built from scratch an amazing voice and text chat experience for people that play multiplayer video games, and, and thats what we built, and its called discord. Narrator it quickly evolved and became a place for users to create communities known as servers with no advertising and little oversight, relying largely on users to moderate problematic content. pinging its going to happen at u. V. A. , in front of the jefferson statue. pinging were going to march to the monument with the torches. You will not replace us narrator as the company grew, it came under fire when White Supremacists began recruiting and organizing on its servers, most infamously for the unite the right rally in charlottesville, virginia. John redgrave is discords head of trust and safety. After the charlottesville riots and the unite the right rally in 2017, it was found that there were people who were organizing on discord. Look, the unite the right rally was a really challenging moment for discord. I was not part of the company at that time, but it was the impetus for discord to build a trust and safety team. We have 150 Million People using discord every month, right. Thats billions of interactions. Right, so the scale of this challenge is immense. Narrator the company has defended itself in the wake of the Intelligence Leaks and the ongoing problems with extremism, saying they represent isolated bad actors on a platform designed for privacy and community. We have taken the stance that a lot of these spaces are like text messaging your friends and your loved ones. And its inappropriate for us to violate peoples privacy, and we dont have the level of precision to do so when it comes to detection. To me, this is. Were a city, right. Discord is a city, right. We have all these people who are trying to find friends in their city and theyre going and, you know, playing sports, right. They might be gaming, they might be, you know, studying together. In any city you are going to have problematic pockets. Narrator sam oakford tracked down one of Jack Teixeiras friends from discord. He wanted to be identified by his online name, pucki. Pucki is someone that i heard about very early on. It took us a long time, many, many months, to track him down and identify him by name, and then get in touch and then convince him to meet with us. Narrator pucki is now 19. This is the first time hes spoken on camera. All right, and were rolling. Do not disturb, there we go. Lets start when you first encountered discord as a platform. I think it was in seventh grade. I was still using skype at that point, and my really good friend at the time, were like, we should ditch skype because everybodys on discord. I formed a habit of being there a lot. Texting, but also speaking. And then. June 2020, thats when i joined oxide. Narrator oxide is a Youtube Channel featuring russian guns, body armor, and military hardware. guns firing viewers who like the content can then join a server on discord oxide hub, which in 2020 had thousands of members, including Jack Teixeira. We were stuck inside that summer, so we were just all online playing games. So i searched for other places to be, and then thats what brought me to oxide. And jack was there, and we hit it off personally. I remember him being. He was, he was a cool guy. The number of coronavirus cases jumped by nearly 5,000 here in the United States over the past 24 hours, as testing has expanded. Teenagers have really lost out when it comes to peer relationships. Narrator it was during the early days of the covid pandemic that Jack Teixeiras friend group was coalescing on discord. Charles says he was around 13 when he met teixeira on oxide hub. He and one of his parents agreed he could be interviewed on the condition his identity be concealed and we use his middle name. I moved to a new school, and it had shut down immediately due to covid restrictions. Just hold that for a second. Actually, you can put that in your pocket. I had no friends and was locked at home. And because i was locked at home, that led me to discord. And discord is where i eventually met Jack Teixeira. And after some time, you know, you play so many games with someone, you have so many good moments with those people, that you kind of form a bond with them. We talked a lot in oxide hub, but it was a big group of people, so it wasnt like talking oneonone, and you would, like, occasionally dm them privately. Narrator but their online conversations had a darker side. We took joy in being offensive. It was something that made. Us tighter as friends, like us against the world. We would talk about how much we hated a race, whether that be jews or blacks, hispanics, or canadians. It could be anything. Youd be like, dude, screw those people, and people would be like, yeah. And whether it was serious or not, we didnt care. It was funny, and that. During such a time where we were so far removed from society. Because of covid, it was so easy to fall into that hole of just hating everything. A lot of older people dont understand how gross younger peoples humor can be, and they dont understand just how disturbing younger peoples perceptions of what can be joked and not joked about is. Narrator like many large public discord servers, oxide hub had its own moderators responsible for policing content. At some point, oxides moderation team, they want to crack down on offensive content, offensive for this being racially motivated images, memes. Because it wa