The leak started just 48 hours after the start of the war

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US Secret Service agent Jack Teixeira (21) is responsible for the largest data breach of the past decade. Since October 2022, the young man has been sharing secret documents about the war in Ukraine with 20 to 30 people on a Discord server – a digital meeting place for like-minded people, often gamers.

Then, in March, came the climax: hundreds of pages of documents were uploaded, including detailed battlefield maps from Ukraine and surveillance logs. They weren’t discovered until just before Easter when they started circulating on Telegram. A few days later, Teixeira was arrested by the FBI.

Documents were published earlier than expected

However, according to a report in the American newspaper New York Times, the scope of Teixeira’s actions is much wider than assumed: a user profile that matches Teixeira’s other online profiles began providing initial information about the war just 48 hours after the Russian invasion to to publish .

This information even went to a group of about 600 participants. Details of Russian and Ukrainian casualties, activities of Moscow intelligence agencies and updates on aid to Ukraine leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies.

The user wrote, “I’ve seen a report from the Pentagon stating that a third of Russia’s armed forces will be used for the invasion.” Apparently he wanted to impress others in the group who questioned him, saying, “I have something more than open source information. An advantage of being in an Air Force intelligence unit.” All these details – the service in the Air Force, the urge to impress others – point to Teixeira.

Why didn’t the US notice the leak?

The New York Times learned about the larger chat room from a Discord user who communicated with Teixeira in the smaller Thug Shaker Central chat room. However, unlike this one, the second chat room was publicly available on a YouTube channel – and can be reached in seconds.

The revelation of some of America’s best-kept secrets has sparked criticism of the Pentagon’s protection of classified data. The US government has repeatedly assured that data from other countries is safe. But the additional information raises the question of why US authorities did not discover the leaks sooner. As investigative journalist Aric Toler noted on Saturday Twitter writes, nearly 10,000 classified documents were still publicly accessible on the server as of Friday.

Source: Blick