The leaker of a top-secret U.S. document containing war plans for Ukraine that was uploaded to a Minecraft-related Discord server (opens in new tab) has been identified as Jack Teixeira, according to the New York Times (opens in new tab). Teixeira was arrested earlier today and is currently in FBI custody.

Teixeira allegedly shared documents with members of his own Discord server called "Thug Shaker Central." According to the report, most of the group's members were teenagers, and they looked up to Teixeira as their leader.

Interestingly, according to the Times report, the secret documents were first uploaded to Thug Shaker Central's server "several months ago," accompanied by a lecture on the importance of staying aware of world affairs. As we learned last week, from there it was uploaded to the Russian-language Telegram channel, 4chan, and the Minecraft Discord server.

One member of Thug Shaker Central, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate, told the Times that Teixeira was not trying to be a whistleblower and that the document he shared on Discord was not intended to be anything more. 'The man is a Christian, an antiwarist, and just wanted to let his friends know what was going on,' he said. 'We have people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games and war games."

Teenage boys are generally not very good at maintaining operational security, and that is clearly the situation here. However, according to one of the investigators in the case, Teixeira revealed himself through his Steam profile, which led to an Instagram account with photos that the investigative team was able to match to locations where the leaked documents were taken before they were uploaded.

(According to Bellingcat researcher Aric Toler (open in new tab), the Steam account of Teixeira, one of the first to report the leak last week, "Arma 3, Zomboid, [PUBG], CS, HOI4, Garry's Mod" (It contained a lot of them.)

There are still many questions to be answered, one of which is how a 21-year-old National Guard employee was able to access so much top secret information in the first place. One official told The Times that government employees with sufficiently high security clearances routinely receive classified documents via e-mail, which can be automatically forwarded to others.

This incident is in contrast to Microsoft President Brad Smith's warning at the recent Semaphore World Economic Summit that "Russia (open in new tab) is basically making an effort to infiltrate these gaming communities. If you are a U.S. national security type, it seems to me that the more pressing threat is not the Russians, but loose rules, sloppy management, and disaffected people on the home front.

For now, a photo congratulating Teixeira on his promotion to Airman First Class in July 2022 remains posted on the 102nd Intelligence Squadron Facebook page (opens in new tab).

"We are aware that law enforcement authorities have arrested an individual accused of illegally posting classified material on our platform," a Discord spokesperson said in a statement sent to PC Gamer. We are cooperating with the authorities and remain committed to doing so as long as this investigation continues. "While Discord values the privacy of our users, our platform can best serve the needs of all when we collectively work together to act responsibly online. We believe that we can do this. Our Terms of Use expressly prohibit the use of Discord for illegal or criminal purposes, including sharing potentially verifiable confidential documents on Discord.

"When Discord's Trust and Safety team discovers offending content, we act quickly to remove it. In this case, we banned the user involved in the initial distribution of the material, removed the content found to be in violation of the terms, and issued a warning to users who continued to share the material in question."