The Discord Leaks
Update: 2024-01-16
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An investigation into how a young Air National Guardsman allegedly leaked classified documents on the Discord chat platform. With The Washington Post, FRONTLINE examines Jack Teixeira’s alleged leak of national security secrets, why he wasn’t stopped and the role of platforms like Discord.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Thanks for listening to the Frontline Audio Cast, the enhanced audio version of our documentaries.
00:00:05
We also produce a podcast, the Frontline Dispatch, available wherever you get your podcasts.
00:00:11
Right now, here is the audio cast of the Discord Leaks.
00:00:17
[Music]
00:00:36
The Pentagon is dealing with the worst leak of U.S. national security intelligence in many years.
00:00:42
As a damning Air Force report has made public,
00:00:44
15 airmen are now being disciplined in the investigation of accused leaker Jack Tixera.
00:00:50
A special investigation with the Washington Post into the alleged leaker.
00:00:54
Talking to Jack's friend, the internet was a huge part of his life.
00:00:58
He's working in this highly sensitive facility,
00:01:01
safe-guarding nation's secrets, and then he goes hops onto Discord,
00:01:04
and it's a racist, paranoid, antisemitic, free-for-all.
00:01:08
It's like he's living this double life.
00:01:09
The chat platform.
00:01:11
This was a problematic pocket on our service.
00:01:13
We don't want these people on Discord.
00:01:15
And the national security failures.
00:01:17
Should the military vending process have caught all of these aspects of this personality?
00:01:22
The vending system is pretty robust, but it's not perfect.
00:01:25
There were countless missed opportunities, and as a result,
00:01:28
we have one of the worst leak cases in modern times.
00:01:31
Now on Frontline, the Discord Leaks.
00:01:34
Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
00:01:43
Thank you.
00:01:45
And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
00:01:48
Additional support is provided by the Abrams Foundation,
00:01:51
committed to excellence in journalism.
00:01:54
Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues.
00:01:58
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
00:02:02
committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world,
00:02:05
more at MacFound.org.
00:02:08
The Hising Simons Foundation, unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities at hsfoundation.org.
00:02:15
And by the Frontline Journalism Fund, with major support from John and Joanne Haigler,
00:02:20
and additional support from Koo and Patricia Ewan,
00:02:23
committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.
00:02:37
This program contains mature content, which may not be suitable for all audiences.
00:02:41
Your discretion is advised.
00:02:43
It started on the online chat platform Discord,
00:02:50
a post by a person known only as Luca.
00:02:53
Classified U.S. intelligence documents.
00:03:00
One batch after another.
00:03:05
Documents labeled top secret soon spilled onto social media.
00:03:09
That's when it made headlines.
00:03:12
Top secret documents about the war in Ukraine have appeared on social media.
00:03:18
Investigations are underway into the leak of classified Pentagon documents.
00:03:22
The Pentagon is dealing with a full-out from the worst leak of U.S. National Security Intelligence
00:03:28
in many years. Top secret documents show Ukraine's air defense vulnerability.
00:03:33
After this hit the news, we're trying to figure out
00:03:36
any extent of the leak and be obviously who leaked it.
00:03:40
We were looking into Luca trying to find traces of him across the web.
00:03:48
Sam Oakford is on the visual forensic team at the Washington Post.
00:03:52
I got in touch with someone else in this Discord server and we had a video call.
00:04:01
"I know exactly how confident I can and the good person I have to somehow find out like that."
00:04:07
He was clear that Luca was not the originator of these leak documents.
00:04:12
"How the hell is this? It's going to be interesting."
00:04:14
He showed me what he said were additional documents that hadn't been in the tranche that Luca was tied to.
00:04:21
Shane Harris is a National Security reporter at the post.
00:04:27
Sam sends me a picture that this source has taken of a document and shared with Sam.
00:04:32
"Oh wow, okay, it's the Chinese spy balloon that had some months earlier drifted over North America.
00:04:41
And this appears to be a picture taken from above the spy balloon,
00:04:46
which means it could only come from a government surveillance platform."
00:04:52
I thought, "How does a teenager have access to highly classified documents?"
00:04:57
A few hours later, the source called back.
00:04:59
"This is a recording from a call I had at night."
00:05:04
The other voice says, "I have some big news. I was able to recover about 350 classified documents
00:05:10
that were posted on Discord."
00:05:11
"That's when this story started."
00:05:19
The reporters arranged to meet the source in person.
00:05:25
"We're sitting on this park bench and this kid arrives.
00:05:30
And before we've even got a chance to start introducing ourselves to each other, he says,
00:05:35
"So I have this information and I want to give it to you."
00:05:36
He pops up in the laptop and it's pretty clear within a minute or two
00:05:43
that this kid has an astonishing range of classified documents.
00:05:48
The leak was far bigger than anyone had understood, more than 300 pages that included some of
00:05:54
the most highly classified information in the U.S. government, from secret Pentagon assessments
00:05:59
of the war in Ukraine to revelations about Iran's nuclear program, to scenarios about a possible
00:06:06
Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And that's when he starts to tell us the story of a group of friends
00:06:14
who he made online during the pandemic in a discord server that they called thug shaker central.
00:06:21
And he described one individual, who over the course of many months, had shared hundreds and hundreds
00:06:27
of classified documents. As the reporters were returning home with the documents,
00:06:33
the FBI was closing in on a suspect. Jack Teixeira. Jack Teixeira. The man suspected of leaking
00:06:43
highly classified military documents has been found. That's him in the red shorts there.
00:06:49
The 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member was taken into custody earlier today.
00:06:54
This 21-year-old air national guardman is alleged to have disclosed hundreds of top secret
00:07:02
government documents online to his gaming buddies. Why did he do it? How did he do it? What drove him?
00:07:11
Who is he?
00:07:17
Who is he?
00:07:18
Over the next six months, reporters at the Washington Post would investigate Jack Teixeira's world.
00:07:29
It largely played out online. Sam Oakford, the Washington Post.
00:07:34
Our whole team was working on this creating networks basically of people,
00:07:39
based on their social media profiles because they interacted in some way with Jack or someone he
00:07:45
was connected to. Chris Digg and poor specializes in tracking down sources online.
00:07:52
He worked as an information security engineer at a gaming platform before becoming an investigative
00:07:59
reporter at the Post. The first thing I try to do was to find a steam problem.
00:08:05
Steam is an online gaming network that is very popular with users on Discord,
00:08:13
and if we could find his friend list, we could start to kind of build out a network of other
00:08:20
users that he was interacting with. Here's a list of people that both Jack and Mr. Luca were friends with.
00:08:27
Out of the many friend requests that I sent out, only a handful actually responded.
00:08:33
One of those happened to be the user that is named Crow. After about a half hour of going back and forth,
00:08:41
they revealed that they had dated. For me, that definitely sent alarm bells off.
00:08:45
What are the odds of one of the first people that kind of replies to my random friend requests?
00:08:51
The day of happens to be someone that dated Jack. It seemed astronomical that that was actually happening.
00:08:58
But her story checked out. In a series of contents with Crow,
00:09:07
the Post reporters began to find out more about her, and her relationship with Jack De Chiro.
00:09:12
Shane Harris, the Washington Post. They met online. They were very close during the pandemic.
00:09:18
I get the feeling that when she's telling this story about Jack, she's speaking to somebody who also
00:09:29
went down some very deep rabbit holes and went to some very dark places.
00:09:33
She became a neo-Nazi because of people she met online.
00:09:41
She wants to tell her story as somebody saying, "Look, I made bad choices in my life."
00:09:47
She agreed to go on camera if we used her online name and her whole face wasn't shown.
00:09:53
She said she no longer has anything to do with the neo-Nazi movement.
00:09:58
No, I don't believe any of that anymore. I realized this time went on that those views were
00:10:04
just inherently false. But before then, I realized that it was
00:10:09
potentially going to get me killed to stay in those communities.
00:10:13
Is that for the reason that you don't want to be identified in this interview?
00:10:17
Partially, yeah. I don't think anyone would seek me out to hurt me,
00:10:23
but it's better to be safe than sorry.
00:10:25
Croce, she met Jack Teixeira online.
00:10:28
I think the first time I remember encountering him, we were on a server about guns and gear,
00:10:37
and, like, Russian stuff. I think I asked him some questions about what he was talking about,
00:10:42
because as much as I like guns, I don't know as much as some of these people,
00:10:47
and it got to a point where, like, I trusted him quite a bit.
00:10:51
What were some of these just general political views of the day?
00:10:55
He was patriotic. He liked America.
00:10:57
I guess,
00:11:00
best way I could possibly describe him would be kind of like a libertarian.
00:11:06
He had strong opinions about everything. He was not a neo-Nazi,
00:11:10
but definitely conservative, really supported, like, gun rights, first amendment rights.
00:11:18
So it was definitely a plus to me that he was fine with my beliefs.
00:11:21
He texted me this big, long, emotional thing,
00:11:25
asking me today to tell me that I was, like, the last part of this dystopian world that he liked.
00:11:35
He knew everything about my life.
00:11:38
Croce says they never met in person, but they had an online relationship for about a year.
00:11:46
I think in front of his friends, he kind of put on this front of, oh, I don't really care,
00:11:49
way more typically masculine and conservatives.
00:11:54
I think he wanted them to think of him pretty, like, highly, but when you're one-on-one with him,
00:11:58
he was much more of a genuinely, like, sweet person.
00:12:05
He loved dragons and dinosaurs and stuff. Since he was a kid, he always wanted to ride a dragon.
00:12:13
And looking back on it, like, it's kind of childish, but, you know, that was the side of him.
00:12:17
You never really saw when you were talking to him.
00:12:19
Jack DeShare's family would not speak on the record,
00:12:24
but the post reporters were able to piece together an outline of his childhood.
00:12:28
DeShare grew up in Dytin, Massachusetts, a tranquil corner of the state. Shane Harris.
00:12:36
You see family photos of him when he's little. He looks just like a typical ordinary little kid.
00:12:41
He seems to come from a big family.
00:12:45
Here he is playing a game online. He looks about six years old in this picture.
00:12:50
He was obsessed as a young kid with military weaponry and hardware and World War II airplanes.
00:12:57
He was a bright kid by all accounts. In middle school, he'd made the honor roll.
00:13:02
We understand he's reasonably close to his parents. He lives at the home of his mother and stepfather,
00:13:10
but he's also close to his dad.
00:13:12
We know that in middle school, he started playing Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto with friends online.
00:13:19
He gets to high school and it seems like maybe this is a period where there's significant change
00:13:28
in his life and starts to have problems.
00:13:32
It was a time he would still talk about when he began dating Crow after high school.
00:13:39
There were many late night calls where he would rant to me about school how much he hated his teacher,
00:13:47
now much he hated some people and he hated the principal and how he wishes he could have shot
00:13:53
up the school. How he should have done it. Just stuff like that.
00:14:02
His sophomore year, there's an incident at the school where there are two students who say that Jack
00:14:10
tells them he has a Molotov cocktail in his backpack and what would they do if he threw one down
00:14:16
the hallway. The kids are alarmed. They go to officials and ultimately the Titan Police Department
00:14:23
investigates this.
00:14:24
Frontline in the Washington Post obtained the report of the subsequent police investigation.
00:14:31
There are witness statements that a number of the students give that document all of these things
00:14:37
that they say that they've heard Jack say, including the threats that he's made about killing black people.
00:14:44
The police meet with Jack and he tries to say I was just talking about a video game.
00:14:56
Ultimately, Jack is suspended from school for one day and required to take a psychological risk
00:15:01
assessment before returning to class. A Discord promotional ad.
00:15:06
We wanted to build a place where you could game, talk and ultimately belong.
00:15:13
So we built Discord and he loved it. By the time to share a gut into trouble in high school,
00:15:20
the chat platform Discord was surging in popularity with gamers. You may Discord into a home.
00:15:26
A place where you and your friends to hang out in.
00:15:28
Discord was started in 2015 by game developers Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevsky.
00:15:36
Jason Citron. We came up with this idea of what if we built from scratch an amazing voice
00:15:41
and text chat experience for people that play multiplayer video games and
00:15:45
and that's what we built and it's called Discord.
00:15:47
It quickly evolved and became a place for users to create communities known as servers.
00:15:54
With no advertising and a little oversight.
00:15:57
Relying largely on users to moderate problematic content.
00:16:01
As the company grew, it came under fire when white supremacists began recruiting and organizing
00:16:17
on its servers. Most infamously for the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
00:16:23
John Redgrave is Discord's head of trust and safety.
00:16:29
With Shane Harris. After the Charlottesville riots in the Unite the Right Rally in 2017,
00:16:35
it was found that there were people who were organizing on Discord.
00:16:39
Look, the Unite the Right Rally was a really challenging moment for Discord.
00:16:44
How was not part of the company at that time?
00:16:46
But it was the impetus for Discord to build a trust and safety team.
00:16:50
We have 150 million people using Discord every month, right?
00:16:55
That's billions of interactions, right?
00:16:58
So the scale of this challenge is immense.
00:17:01
The company has defended itself in the wake of the intelligence leaks and the ongoing problems
00:17:09
with extremism, saying they represent isolated bad actors on a platform design for privacy and
00:17:15
community. We have taken the stance that a lot of these spaces are like text messaging
00:17:23
your friends and your loved ones and it's inappropriate for us to violate people's privacy and
00:17:31
we don't have the level of precision to do so when it comes to detection. To me, this is
00:17:37
we're a city, right? Discord is a city, right? We have all these people who are trying to find
00:17:44
friends in their city and they're going in, you know, playing sports, right? They might be gaming,
00:17:50
they might be, you know, studying together. In any city, you are going to have problematic pockets.
00:17:57
Sam Oakford tracked down one object to share his friends from Discord.
00:18:04
He wanted to be identified by his online name, Pocky.
00:18:11
Pocky is someone that I heard about very early on. Took us a long time, many, many months to
00:18:18
track him down and identify him by name and then get in touch and then convince him to meet with us.
00:18:23
Pocky is now 19. This is the first time he's spoken on camera.
00:18:29
Do not disturb. There we go. Let's start when you first encounter Discord as a platform.
00:18:39
I think it was in the seventh grade. I was still using Skype at that point and my really good friend
00:18:48
at the time were like, we should ditch Skype because everybody's on Discord. I formed a habit of
00:18:54
being there a lot, texting, but also speaking. And then June 2020, that's when I joined Oxide.
00:19:07
Oxide is a YouTube channel featuring Russian guns, body armor, and military hardware.
00:19:13
Viewers who like the content can then join a server on Discord. Oxide Hub, which in 2020
00:19:24
had thousands of members, including Jack Teixeira. Pocky. We were stuck inside that summer,
00:19:30
so we were just all online playing games. So I searched for other places to be and then that's
00:19:35
what brought me to Oxide. And Jack was there and we hit it off personally. I remember him being,
00:19:43
he was a cool guy.
00:19:45
And the number of coronavirus cases jumped by nearly 5,000 here in the United States over the past 24
00:19:53
hours as testing has expanded. Teenagers have really lost out when it comes to peer relationships.
00:19:59
It was during the early days of the COVID pandemic that Jack Teixeira's friend group was
00:20:04
coalescing on Discord. Charles says he was around 13 when he met Teixeira on Oxide Hub.
00:20:11
He and one of his parents agreed he could be interviewed on the condition his identity be concealed
00:20:17
and reuse his middle name. I moved to a new school and it had shut down immediately due to cover
00:20:23
the restrictions. Hold that for a second. Actually, you can put that in a pocket. I had no friends and
00:20:28
I was locked at home. And because I was locked at home, that led me to Discord. Discord is where I
00:20:35
eventually met Jack Teixeira. And after some time, you know, you play so many games, it's someone
00:20:40
you have so many good moments for those people that you kind of form a bond with them.
00:20:43
Crow. We talked a lot in Oxide Hub, but it was a big group of people. So it wasn't like talking one
00:20:50
on one and you would like occasionally DM them privately. But their online conversations had a
00:20:57
darker side. Pucky. We took joy in being offensive. It was something that made us tighter as friends,
00:21:08
like us against the world. We would talk about how much we hated a race, whether that be Jews or
00:21:15
or blacks, Hispanics or Canadians. It could be anything. You'd like, dude, screw those people and
00:21:22
people would be like, yeah. And whether it was serious or not, we didn't care. It was funny. And that
00:21:30
during such a time where we were so far removed from society, because of COVID, it was so easy to
00:21:36
fall into that hole of just hating everything. Charles. A lot of older people don't understand how gross
00:21:43
younger people's humor can be. And they don't understand just how disturbing younger people's perceptions
00:21:48
of what can be joked and not joked about is. Like many large public discord servers, Oxide Hub had
00:21:55
its own moderators responsible for policing content. Pucky. At some point, Oxide's moderation team,
00:22:03
they want to crack down on offensive content. Offensive for this being racially motivated
00:22:11
images, beams. Because it was a public server, they didn't want anything too edgy. So they started
00:22:18
cracking down on this content. And then Pucky, he made a smaller server and invited a bunch of
00:22:28
people who used to be active in the voice chats. And then this is where you could say the core members
00:22:36
became solidified with each other. 99% of my time was in there. What was the role the Jack played in
00:22:44
the group? I mean, he was pretty well liked by everyone. He was someone that if you saw them,
00:22:49
like, joined the VC and they were just sitting in their alone, it would fill up really quickly with
00:22:56
other people just wanting to talk to him. He was an awesome guy to hang out around. Like anytime he
00:23:01
entered the room, like mood change, like stuff's going down. This is going to be fun. We're going to
00:23:06
have a good night. After the George Floyd protests dominated the news in the summer of 2020,
00:23:15
the content on Pucky's server became even more racist and violent.
00:23:20
Like in the calls, people would be in their military gear, yelling a lot about black people,
00:23:27
about police. There was some of like just keep burning stuff down, you know. There was one day where
00:23:35
people joined the call and just started doing push-ups to prepare for like the end times.
00:23:41
This is a screen recording of a group gaming together.
00:23:49
Jack Tashara used his online name, the ex-caliber effect. Unlucky.
00:23:59
[laughs]
00:24:01
Gore was posted. You'd post videos of Jihaddi, you know, beheadings and things like that or
00:24:14
cartel killings. You'd be like, "Dude, look at this guy, get his head chopped off."
00:24:18
It was cool. What do you think about this now?
00:24:24
I'm definitely not proud of it at all. It's embarrassing and it's quite frankly
00:24:34
humiliating to speak about it now, but I'm willing to.
00:24:37
Do you think that the community Jack was in on Discord nudged him closer to making this bad
00:24:45
decision that he ultimately made? Yeah, I think so, yeah. I think it was just the whole
00:24:52
like psychology of being in an online community like that.
00:24:55
I mean, there's like a term chronically online
00:25:00
where you lose touch of how interacting with people in real life is
00:25:06
and like real consequences and real issues in the world. Those just go away.
00:25:14
Washington Post reporter Shane Harris.
00:25:19
In the summer of 2020, Jack graduates high school. That's, of course, the first year of the pandemic.
00:25:25
He actually skips high school graduation because he's off to basic training at Lackland Air Force
00:25:32
Base. He goes on to start taking the coursework that he needs to become a cyber transport specialist.
00:25:40
It was a low-level IT job, but it required a security clearance and a background check.
00:25:48
He was a little bit worried they were going to, in their interview, bring up,
00:25:53
"Hey, we found this Discord account or we found this Discord server." At that time, he did
00:25:58
become less active in Discord, and he was very worried about keeping the things he was doing
00:26:04
private and safe. What was he specifically worried that the background investigation might turn
00:26:09
up with regards to Discord? There was a lot of like racist talk on that server.
00:26:16
There was a lot of talk of killing ATF agents, killing different government officials,
00:26:22
committing acts of terrorism, things that are probably not great for someone in the military
00:26:29
to be saying. So I think that's probably what he was worried about.
00:26:32
But DeShare was investigated and ultimately approved for security clearance by the Department
00:26:42
of Defense. One big question we have right now is, how did Jack DeShare get a security clearance?
00:26:48
I mean, if we're looking at Jack DeShare and all the things that he posted online,
00:26:54
the racist, violent comments, the memes, the imagery, and the fact that he ultimately is
00:26:58
accused of leaking hundreds of classified documents, it's like, okay, we'll wait a minute.
00:27:02
There should have been red flags longed away.
00:27:05
The Department of Defense declined to give an interview or answer questions about Jack DeShare.
00:27:12
A Pentagon review found that there wasn't a single point of failure in the leaks,
00:27:17
but set improvements were needed to the security clearance process and how classified information
00:27:23
is safeguarded. Shane Harris spoke to retired Lieutenant General Scott Reyes, former director of
00:27:30
the Air National Guard. All the checks and balances of the system and the bureaucracy looked into
00:27:36
the Jack DeShare's background and he was vetted and approved for that type of clearance.
00:27:41
Jack, we were told from friends was very obsessed with violent videos, violent content.
00:27:46
I mean, it's a picture of a really, you know, dark, violence-prone, racist, you know, gun
00:27:53
lumber, basically. Should the military vetting process of the caught all of these aspects of
00:27:59
his personality? Yes and no. The military vetting system is pretty robust and it catches a lot of
00:28:07
stuff. He was a, you know, young high school kid, took a test, did very, very well on it. And so,
00:28:12
yes, the system vets and finds a lot of the seasoning, but again, it's not perfect and some things come
00:28:20
through. Since the Cold War, the security clearance protocol has involved extensive
00:28:28
interviews with people who know applicants well in real life. Shane Harris, you can't really know Jack
00:28:36
DeShare unless you've also looked at the amount of time that he spent online because it was a huge
00:28:41
part of his life. So they had this blind spot to Jack DeShare, right? They don't know all the things
00:28:49
that he's saying and doing online. To receive his security clearance, DeShare would have had to fill
00:28:59
out a detailed questionnaire, the SF-86. This is the current SF-86, 136 pages long. This is literally
00:29:10
mine from 2019. Mark Zade is a lawyer who has represented hundreds of people going through the
00:29:17
security clearance process. Now, this forum has changed over time. There is nothing in the forum
00:29:24
that asks, "For what are your usernames on different social media platforms? What social media platforms
00:29:33
are you on?" The government had no way to do a predictive analysis of the risk that it was
00:29:40
adopting and granting him a security clearance. So, let me present some instances from his background,
00:29:46
when he was online. You tell me, would these negatively affect his ability to get a clearance,
00:29:52
making racist jokes? It depends. So, every answer I'm always going to give on a clearance
00:30:00
case is always it depends, because that's a way. But, yes. Threatening, even if in a what you might
00:30:08
consider a joky way to kill a federal law enforcement officer. Yes, absolutely of concern for
00:30:15
a security clearance. Coming up with imagined scenarios for how you would kill a federal law
00:30:20
enforcement officer. Absolutely a concern. You know, if that very simple question, what social media
00:30:28
sites are you on had been asked on the forum, and one source from that social media site had been
00:30:35
obtained. He might never have gotten a security clearance. He might never have gotten a security
00:30:39
clearance. By October 2021, Jack DeShire was working as an IT specialist with a 102-second
00:30:48
intelligence wing at the Otis International Guard Base in Massachusetts. To the extent that you
00:30:54
understand it, what is Jack DeShire's job? Lieutenant General Scott Rice. For all practical
00:31:00
purposes, he's a technician. He fixes and repairs systems. Maybe computer systems, hardware software,
00:31:08
file servers, data storage, all of those parts and pieces that sit behind in front of or next
00:31:18
to an intelligence analyst that they use as their tools. They're in there working on the system.
00:31:26
You can't help but see classified information. Correct. Absolutely. And so you would think that a
00:31:32
technician doesn't need access to top secret information, but they're going to see touch and feel
00:31:40
top secret information all the time. DeShire was working in a skiff, a secure facility where personal
00:31:47
electronics are banned. He would sometimes work unsupervised at night, maintaining air conditioning
00:31:54
units and answering phones. I mean, it must have been intoxicating for him. He's working in this
00:32:01
highly sensitive facility, safe guarding the nation's secrets. And then he goes home and hops on to
00:32:07
Discord. And it's a racist, paranoid, anti-Semitic free-for-all. It's like he's living this double life.
00:32:14
Around this time on Puckie's Discord server.
00:32:26
DeShire was posting videos mimicking first-person shooters. One video threatened violence against
00:32:33
Jews and Black people. Jews scam the f*ck rape and I'm acting. Puckie, with Washington Post reporter Sam
00:32:39
Oakford. I was there when it was posted. I remember being posted and I was like, what are you shooting?
00:32:46
That out of the ordinary. Was that something bad? That sort of rhetoric was common. I'll pretend
00:32:56
to side, right? It was racist, but if you were in the know, it was funny and you were included.
00:33:04
You're talking about your politics, were they sort of the spiritorial? Yes, you know, Jews rule the
00:33:11
world. This was huge in the pandemic. The vaccines, like all these companies, they've got Jewish
00:33:16
CEOs, we can't trust it. And so his Jack is one of the people talking about this. Definitely.
00:33:23
Puckie says he now regrets the anti-Semitism, hate speech, and conspiracy theories.
00:33:30
At the end of 2021, with COVID restrictions winning, he says he began spending less time on Discord.
00:33:41
Control of the server was given over to Tishaura. The server name eventually changed to Thugs'
00:33:48
Shake or Central, a racist and homophobic reference to gay pornography. I would hate to describe
00:33:54
in the server as like a cult of personality, but it became very centered around Jack's humor
00:34:00
in his point of view. Jack Tishaura was older than most of the group. Many of whom were young teenagers.
00:34:07
Crow. The more extremist he got and the smaller his circle got, he felt it was his duty to be this
00:34:14
father figure, to be this man that would tell them what's going on and had all this information.
00:34:23
By this time, Crow says they'd broken off their relationship and she had left the server. Sam Oakford.
00:34:31
A really key element was the way that the server became smaller and smaller over time and it wasn't
00:34:39
only that there were fewer people and that there were certain types of people who made the toxicity
00:34:45
levels rise and rise. Him being the owner, he would have the final say in what happens, so people
00:34:52
began leaving, getting banned, Jack would ban them. It wasn't like silencing people because we thought
00:35:00
their opinions were bad, it was this guy isn't funny or he's a normie, get him out of here.
00:35:06
Sounds a little cut to it. Yeah, it was down to maybe like 20 guys. When you have a group who share
00:35:14
similar views, it will progressively become edgier, darker, brutal and it's easy to become locked in
00:35:24
that echo chamber. Discord says that it shut down one of Jack Deshera's user accounts for hateful content,
00:35:35
but that he had two others and the reason it took no action against Thugshaker Central was because
00:35:41
nobody reported it. Shane Harris with Discord Trust and Safety Vice President John Redgrave.
00:35:47
In the case of Thugshaker Central, Jack Deshera was a moderator and the city analogy it's Jack's
00:35:53
house is essentially that serve. Yeah, he built his house. We found Thugshaker Central
00:35:58
violated several other terms of services, hate speech, images of gore, threats of violence.
00:36:04
These are all things that we've documented in our reporting as well. Why were these particular
00:36:09
kids allowed to continue sharing this kind of material for more than a year? This comes down to
00:36:14
our ability to identify what's happening in these spaces. We rely on user reports.
00:36:21
We rely on third parties to help us with intelligence. None of that happened here.
00:36:27
Well, none of it was likely to happen because they were all part of this community. I mean,
00:36:31
if one of them objected to racist and anti-submitted comments being made routinely,
00:36:36
they might have flagged it, but they didn't because they were all in on that.
00:36:40
So, what you're saying is that the company has no way of monitoring for that kind of content
00:36:46
on its own. We require that people are helping to keep discord safe. We do scan spaces in particular
00:36:56
for child sex abuse material. That is unambiguously bad, but when it comes to other classes of abuse,
00:37:04
we all need to collectively think about, are we just diving into someone's privacy? So in our city,
00:37:10
this is the difference between someone who has a listening device in your apartment versus not,
00:37:16
right? And it's certainly our choice to not put that listening device in in those private spaces.
00:37:24
In early 2022, Jack DeSharah started focusing his discord posts on world events.
00:37:38
I'm not sure how to explain it. It was just a guy's new channel. At first, the channel was for the war,
00:37:45
and Jack was like, "Hey, I have this. I have these numbers." And we're like, "Sure, dude,
00:37:52
post it." So then he started posting them.
00:37:53
As the war in Ukraine progressed, Pucky says DeSharah started sharing classified information
00:38:03
on folks' eco-central. It just sort of started with, like, casualty numbers and equipment losses
00:38:11
from both sides in the Ukraine Russia conflict. It was very basic. It just text like,
00:38:17
"These are the real numbers, guys, from like, wherever. I can't remember if you said it was from
00:38:22
the DOD or anything like that." I'm pretty sure he did. I likened it to him wanting us to be prepared
00:38:27
for whatever the world was going to throw at us. We spoke about the conspiracies and how we distrusted
00:38:33
the government. This was just another iteration of that. We didn't trust the news and we were
00:38:39
getting it from the source. Shane Harris. He was taking notes from the documents that work,
00:38:45
possibly using speech to text on his phone to transcribe them. But he's now leaving work and coming
00:38:51
back with whole swaths of intelligence from reports, much of it verbatim and sharing them with friends online.
00:39:02
Discord chat transcripts released by federal investigators show that Teixeira was, in fact,
00:39:07
already leaking classified information before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
00:39:12
Jack gives someone who lives in a unnamed foreign city to be in Europe. He heads up that
00:39:20
there will be people coming. He uses very bolder language. He says there'll be a wave of
00:39:26
inwards from a city in Ukraine soon, in allusion to, you know, the impending war. And he says all
00:39:33
elaborate more when I get home. So this is significant for multiple reasons. It's Jack appearing to
00:39:40
give a preview of the invasion of Ukraine based on classified material. It's him talking to a foreign
00:39:46
national about this. The post reporters found that Teixeira's audience on Discord was wider than
00:39:52
just thugshaker central. And he was regularly having exchanges like this on a much larger public
00:39:58
server called Abanovsky's Exclusion Zone. Sam Oakford spent weeks mapping to share his posts and
00:40:06
contacts on the Abanovsky server, a community of military enthusiasts and gamers with more than 600
00:40:13
members around the world. He found one of Abanovsky's moderators in Arizona.
00:40:21
Jeremiah. Jack first really appeared around when the war started. So February of 2022,
00:40:30
he had joined the server before then, but never really talked. I found that out when I looked
00:40:36
back through his messages. It is a little odd that he just all of a sudden started talking right
00:40:41
around the start of the war. Jeremiah agreed to be interviewed on the condition we use only his first name.
00:40:52
Yeah, so Jack started posting more over time. Yeah, he started making like bi-weekly to weekly updates
00:41:01
when the war was more active. Almost daily in some cases, especially early on like May and June of 2022.
00:41:10
So you were getting a real window into what was going on in the world relating to the war.
00:41:15
Oh, absolutely. It was very fascinating, especially being so interested in things like that.
00:41:19
You're, as you know, someone who likes history, it's one of those things where it's like you're
00:41:25
getting direct access to firsthand information, which is extremely hard to get, especially when
00:41:29
you're living through something. But being able to see it immediately was just very fascinating and
00:41:35
a little bit exhilarating. Jeremiah says to share a head an eager audience at Abanovsky and that he even
00:41:42
took requests for classified information. He had said that, you know, if you live in this country,
00:41:49
you can kind of ask if I have anything on it, I'll tell you. So you'd have people from all over
00:41:54
the place being like, "Hey, do you know anything that was going on about this event in my country?"
00:41:58
And if he had anything, he'd kind of tell them. My thought the whole time was someone else will
00:42:03
report him. You know, it'll happen eventually. There's no way. And it just never did. It just kept
00:42:07
posting and posting and posting. Did you consider reporting Jack at any point?
00:42:13
I did. I had times where I'm like, I probably should report him. You know, I was 18 or so stupid.
00:42:19
No, it's kind of just wanting to look at information. Yeah. A lot of people told him, you know,
00:42:25
"Hey, you do realize it's illegal, right?" He said, "Yeah, I know I don't care. I thought he was an
00:42:33
absolute idiot and was definitely going to get arrested." Air Force members show that on more than
00:42:40
one occasion, he was caught in the act. Shane Harris. It says that Jack DeShira had been observed
00:42:47
taking notes on classified intelligence information in the skiff. He was observed putting a note in his
00:42:54
pocket. He was told to stop. Then a month later, another warning. But then they go on to offer him
00:43:02
essentially a promotion. To become an analyst, it says that he declined the training opportunity at
00:43:08
this time. And then three months later, DeShira was caught viewing classified content without authorization.
00:43:21
The Air Force declined to give an interview, but this week published its own investigation which
00:43:26
pointed to systemic failures in the handling of classified information and strongly criticized
00:43:32
the culture of complacency at Otis Air National Guard Base. It found that several individuals knew
00:43:39
about DeShira's breaches of protocol, but intentionally failed to report the full details.
00:43:46
The lack of oversight made it possible to print classified documents without detection.
00:43:51
The commander of the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis was relieved of his command.
00:43:58
Fourteen others were disciplined for dereliction of duties.
00:44:02
"If you were a supervisor in that base or any base and you saw a young man who was an IT tech
00:44:10
looking at, you know, top secret information, what would your reaction have been?"
00:44:15
Retired Lieutenant General Scott Rice. "I would come down on somebody that's going down a pathway
00:44:22
that is not within their job set. I would come down on them very hard and say this is not appropriate
00:44:28
and pull them off the line."
00:44:29
Documents from federal investigators show that by January 2023, DeShira was concerned that he
00:44:40
may be discovered transcribing classified information at work. He decided to switch his approach.
00:44:47
He removes documents from work, takes them home, and takes photographs of them with his phone,
00:44:53
and he uploads those. And he uploads more than 300 documents like that.
00:44:58
Jeremiah. "We knew it was illegal when he was still just typing everything out,
00:45:06
but not pictures of documents, which is, you know, fully incriminating."
00:45:10
February 28, 2023. That evening, a teenager at home in Southern California
00:45:22
logged into Discord and initiated the fall of Jack DeShira. He went by the name Luca.
00:45:31
"He was naive, immature, kind of the whole nine yards of a kid." Sam Oakford.
00:45:39
Luca was one of the younger members of Thugshaker Central. He was someone who had a reputation
00:45:45
for posting what you might say, and he would post things in a reckless way. So it set off everything
00:45:55
that would happen over the next month. Luca reposted images of dozens of the classified documents
00:46:02
originally leaked to Thugshaker. They were sourced from nearly every U.S. intelligence agency.
00:46:08
Never before seen Ukrainian battlefield assessments. Locations where the CIA has recruited sources,
00:46:15
the technology the U.S. uses to track Russian forces.
00:46:20
He probably just thought they were like a funny meme and posted them. Within days,
00:46:24
another user forwarded the posts to another server. The leak was becoming a spill.
00:46:30
Jack DeShira wrote to his friends on Abanovsky.
00:46:34
Jeremiah. He messaged on March 19th about how he's done posting,
00:46:40
and then thread disappears so he mustn't delete it.
00:46:47
Then in early April, the classified documents were anonymously posted on 4chan,
00:46:53
a site popular with far-right extremists. Soon afterwards, they appeared on a Pro-Russian Telegram
00:47:00
channel. Shane Harris. As these documents are now popping up like mushrooms all over the internet,
00:47:06
Jack hears from one of his friends in Abanovsky's Exclusion Zone that he thinks he's seen some of his
00:47:12
thingies on the internet, meaning classified material. This is when it kind of hits the fan for Jack, right?
00:47:19
On the evening of April 6th, the news broke that the Pentagon and the FBI were trying to
00:47:29
identify the source of the leaks. Top secret documents about the war in Ukraine have a
00:47:35
"The Pentagon is investigating the leak of classified documents detailing U.S. and NATO's
00:47:41
Pentagon documents are being discovered, posted on social media." DeShira took drastic action.
00:47:46
Sam Oakford. Once this story was in the news, Jack attempted to delete anything that he could
00:47:53
control. Jack controlled the Thuckshaker Central. He knew it on April 7th.
00:48:00
The same day, the FBI actually contacts Discord for the first time. Discord's John Redgrave.
00:48:06
I get a phone call. I immediately stand up a team of people. We started to take action while
00:48:11
also collaborating with different law enforcement agencies. Classified material had been leaking on
00:48:17
Discord for more than a year, but it had gone undetected until now. No users at all reported anything
00:48:25
about this to us. How many servers were found to have classified documents moving through them as
00:48:30
you described it? I don't know the answer off the top of my head. Is it possible you all don't know
00:48:35
how many servers these documents popped up in? Well, look, we're constantly trying to evolve how
00:48:41
we can identify these things, but without knowing what is and is not classified and without having
00:48:48
some way to essentially detect that proactively, we can't say definitively where classified documents
00:48:56
go and that's true of every single tech company. This is not a Discord problem. This is an internet
00:49:02
problem. We have no capability to identify when a classified document has potentially been leaked.
00:49:09
So the moment to share a deleted Thuckshaker Central, it could not be recovered anything in it?
00:49:16
It could not be recovered. So if that means that it's gone and you can't recover that
00:49:20
under any circumstances. There is no way for us to recover information that's deleted by a user
00:49:27
on Discord. So in essence, he was successful in a limited way in covering his tracks there by
00:49:33
deleting the server. I don't think he was successful given the fact that lots of screenshots have appeared.
00:49:38
DeShara could delete the Thuckshaker server, but he didn't have the same power over Abanovsky.
00:49:45
Sam Oakford. He's running through various ways he can most efficiently clear up what he did on Abanovsky.
00:49:53
Jeremiah. He had asked me to go back and delete anything he might have posted outside the thread
00:50:02
in February of 2022. He also said, you know, don't tell anyone, which I didn't. But immediately he
00:50:08
started taking screenshots of things and like just kind of collecting information in case it was ever
00:50:14
needed. So he's telling people to delete anything that has anything to do with me. If anyone comes
00:50:20
talking to you, don't tell them anything. In the days that followed, investigators say to Shara
00:50:25
destroyed electronics equipment, adopted a new email address and got a new phone number. Shane Harris.
00:50:32
You see him in these days understanding that the walls are closing in. He knows people are looking
00:50:38
for him and he's trying to delete the evidence that might lead to his door. Federal agents were getting
00:50:45
closer to TeShara and the word was getting out among people who had no name online. Crow. I knew
00:50:52
a few days before it ever hit National News. I used to be very good friends with Mr. Luka
00:51:01
and I was still close friends with people kind of connected to him and I heard that they were looking
00:51:05
into him for classified information. Luka was the first person who got visited by any law enforcement.
00:51:12
On April 10, 2023, the FBI interviewed Luka.
00:51:22
He told them that a clean cut white male named Jack who lived in Massachusetts and worked for the
00:51:30
U.S. Air National Guard was the source of the leaks. Three days later, federal agents moved in on
00:51:40
Jack TeShara. He was waiting for them on the back porch of his mother's house, reading a Bible.
00:51:50
Discord friend Charles. The last thing he ever said to us, he said, sorry guys,
00:51:57
I really wish this would never happen. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed that this day would never
00:52:03
come, but now it's just in God's hand. I love you all. And then that was basically it.
00:52:09
Jack TeShara was charged with six counts of retaining and transmitting classified
00:52:16
national defense information. The indictment said that what he leaked could be used to the injury
00:52:23
of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation. Nobody else has been charged
00:52:29
in relation to the leaks. TeShara has pled not guilty and remains incarcerated pending his trial.
00:52:37
If convicted, he could face decades in prison. Shane Harris, if you look at the whole narrative
00:52:44
then of Jack, there were so many points where he could have been flagged or interrogated further
00:52:50
or even stopped and they just don't happen. Attorney Mark Zade. Once you start tracking back,
00:52:56
you see failure, failure, failure, failure. They were countless missed opportunities literally
00:53:04
from the outset and as a result we have one of the worst leak cases in modern times.
00:53:19
To me it felt like a mix of his ego and ideology and just all that blended together.
00:53:25
Because when you're on Discord that much, you lose a lot of what normal socialization is.
00:53:33
I genuinely just think he never thought they'd come for him.
00:53:49
Go to PBS.org/frontline for more reporting from our partners at the Washington Post.
00:53:55
I thought how does a teenager have access to highly classified documents?
00:54:00
We're trying to figure out the extent of the leak and be obviously who leaked it.
00:54:06
And more about the classified documents shown in the film. Connect with Frontline on Facebook,
00:54:11
Instagram, Adex, formerly Twitter, and stream anytime on the PBS app, YouTube or PBS.org/frontline.
00:54:19
Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
00:54:26
Thank you. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
00:54:30
Additional support is provided by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence in journalism.
00:54:37
Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues.
00:54:41
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more
00:54:46
just-verdent and peaceful world, more at Macfound.org. The Hising Simons Foundation,
00:54:53
unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities at hsfoundation.org.
00:54:58
And by the Frontline Journalism Fund, with major support from John and Joanne Hagler,
00:55:03
and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.
00:55:10
The Discord leaks was produced and directed by Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong,
00:55:33
written by Thomas Jennings, and co-produced by Fritz Kramer.
00:55:36
The correspondents were Shane Harris and Sam Oakford. The senior producers were Dan Edge and Frank
00:55:43
Kuhn. The managing editor of Frontline is Andrew Metz. The editor-in-chief and executive producer
00:55:49
of Frontline is Rainy Aronson-Rath. Frontlines, the Discord leaks, is available on Amazon Prime Video.
00:56:00
[Music]
00:56:17
[Music]
