Pentagon leaks linked to young gun enthusiast who worked at military base | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon leaks linked to young gun enthusiast who worked at military base

theguardian.com

65 pointsforuhar102 comments

Some more links. Bellingcat broke the Discord server story 5 days ago[1]. The Washington Post has a stunning story, including barely obscured video (unaltered voice) from a teenager who was active in the group and considers himself a good friend of the leaker[2]. The Guardian story cites and quotes extensively from the WP story, so that should be considered the original source, but does add more context. Emptywheel (who has been pretty consistently excellent when it comes to leaks and the like) has more analysis[3].

[1]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/04/09/from-discord-to-4...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/12/discord...

[3]: https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/04/13/bear-versus-pig-on-the...

>The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

>The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/world/documents-leak-leak...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557583

> >The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

4chan strikes again

sounds about right.

This is completely unrelated but I will never understand why people make throwaways for comments like this - I make all my own dumb snarky comments on this account and it's never anything more than like -5 points. Who cares?

Do it very often and dang starts reprimanding you. Do it too often and he rate-limits you. Do it too often after that, and he may ban you. So that's one reason.

Also, some people have their real contact info associated with their main account, and don't want that bit of snark associated with them in real life. Personally, I think that lacks integrity (literally, in the sense of their being "only one of you").

Washington post article:

https://archive.is/8eHnp

The leaker's failures are obvious. The real failure by far is that access to this kind of "secret" material seems to be so easy to get.

That's what makes this situation so bizarre. It's NOT that easy to get, and most of these classified materials are truncated and distributed separately. In the event of a leak, only a small amount of hard to assemble intelligence is exposed. It sounds to me like the entire command needs to be re-educated on handling intelligence.

The impression is giving that certain kinds of people are given easier access, so slip through filters. And there level of access and what they can do is plain ridiculous, relative to their rank or job.

Seemingly they can kind of easily rummage through whatever, which the Snowden case gives hints at. This guy supposedly had briefing slides from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You would think that's near impossible, for someone at his level, but somehow it wasn't.

Here's the thing: it's actually hard to get for all the wrong reasons.

For example, if you've consumed cannabis in the past 12 months? Forget about it.

Source: my interim access to Public Trust (several tiers below the type of information in these leaks) was revoked and final adjudication took 5 months because in November I admitted to partaking 4 months previous to filling out my first form.

Info is exploding. Hard to keep track of everything. Probably impossible.

I wont be surprised if they actually have some knowledge mgmt model that shows the point above which they cant keep tabs on everything. But its the govt. They are never going to admit that in public.

So many of the comments I've seen about this follow a similar pattern: 1) sounds like the leaker was a trumper, 2) I can't wait til he gets what he deserves.

As with any leak of this kind, stories on the people involved make for juicy gossip, and everyone seems to fixate on that rather than the content.

Where can I read the actual leaked documents. I noticed it mainly with MSM. They refuse to link to the original source material. Other media would almost always source their information

How does a teenager gain top secret clearance to a SCIF?

They don't. The man working on the government base did and then released it into a chat room that the teenager was a part of.

How does a man working at a government base get to the point he releases top secret information?

Untreated and neurotized insecurity makes one look for approval in the stupidest ways, and most harmful places. From the inside, however, the group pressure doesn't feel stupid. I guess.

Lotta people with clearances these days.

Plus the military gets who they get; they can't offshore to India or try to poach talent in Croatia. So that means you get a right-wing nutjob from Kansas.

That said, doesn't mean the military didn't screw up a bunch. Chelsea Manning had a long list of disciplinary issues to include fist-fights with superiors, and by all accounts should have had a clearance revoked and/or been booted out of MI.

Also can't discount the power of bribes and/or propaganda. Russia and China have been going hard at right-wing sources with the goal of, among other things, stirring dissent and gaining a foothold in the military.

I'm not sure what you mean. It's not unheard of.

From a different article it says he is a Air National Guard "cyber transport systems journeyman". Why does that role have access to such incredible amount of TS information? The Pentagon's lack of control of their data is asking for more leaks by the lowest level petty leakers

Whatever his reasoning was, this guy saved thousands of lives by forcing the delay of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Still a more positive effect than some Peace Nobels had overall.

I’m skeptical. This seems designed to give the government carte blanche to go after more of the rightwing types who got caught up in Jan 6. I don’t support what happened Jan 6, but I can’t help but notice how quickly it was use as an excuse for repression. Very predictable.

>I can’t help but notice how quickly it was use as an excuse for repression.

Let's just ignore the irony of the folks with "don't tread on me stickers" next to their "thin blue line" stickers marching on the capital chanting about and barely failing to kill the Vice President of the United States, or sitting Senators, as we know they were within a hallway of them as they (our elected representatives) were fleeing and huddled for protection. But I guess the core of their protest, over-turning a democratic election, is really admirable.

But charge them? Make them stand trial? How repressive indeed.

edit: "who got caught up", too cute.

The government has been pushing for more power since... forever? Since the civil war at least. National security letters. Secret FISA court. Extraordinary rendention. Data taps on all major social media platforms, all telecos, and who knows what else. Warrantless searches within 50 miles of borders, shorelines, and international airports. Enhanced interrogations. Very few people in politics seem interested in curbing it.

Yet what repression do you see in the Jan 6th cases? Wouldn't you expect to get arrested for breaking into any (super important) federal building and disrupting any (super important) government meeting? Is the government taking excessive action beyond fines and a few year's imprisonment?

Moreover, from a geopolitical and law/order standpoint, wouldn't you see it as imperative for the government to take legal action in the wake of insurrections? Hasn't this been a weakness of costal cities (like with CHAV)? While I'm all for restraining government power, there are situations where it must be used or you effectively have anarchy.

> The government has been pushing for more power since... forever? [...] Secret FISA court.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was/is (and FISA more generally was/is) a constraint established on formerly-unconstrained executive-branch power after the Church Committee report, not an expansion of government powers (the War on Terror-era amendments to FISA loosened some of those restrictions, but still not to the pre-FISA state.)

So, this is a particularly bad example for your claim.

Same mistake of reality winner.

Not at all.

Do you remember when mainstream media outlets like WaPo and The Guardian went out of their way to refuse to publish any details about the Trump resistance leaker, even after his identity became publicly known?

Now they go out of their way to expose this one. Mainstream media outlets are really arms of the Western security state. I should hope this is absolutely clear to everyone at this point.

You're suggesting that in all Mainstream media outlets there is someone who's taking their marching (or editorial) orders from someone in the state department.

If true now that would be a story that someone would love to break.

They lay out some pretty broad marching orders here:

https://www.state.gov/information-for-journalists

For interviewing State Department people, yes. Do they tell journalists how to report on international events? If so, you need a different URL to demonstrate it...

They don’t have to take orders. They know implicitly what the State wants. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have their jobs.

This has been explained repeatedly since “Manufacturing Consent”.

I mean, we know that both Twitter and Facebook took marching orders from both the state of California and the Biden administration and no one seemed to care, so whatever.

You're right, sharing anonymous opinions from a government post is on exactly on the same level as disclosing military classified secrets. Give me a break.

Have to agree. There are now large sections of the media which are really just a "mouthpiece for the regime".

Irrespective of the contents of the leaks, the Trump resistance leaker wrote an Op-Ed for the NYTimes and leaked formally, directly to the media, so of course the media is going to protect its anonymous sources.

This leaker was trying to win an internet flame war on a subculture forum.

Alternatively, maybe it is clear to responsible media organizations that some leaks really are in the public interest, and some really are against the public interest.

There was nothing scandalous in this leak to be exposed, but it does put the US's sources within Russia at risk.

Distrusts the government, but also works for it? I'd call that a mole. The decades-long infiltration of the military by openly racist, anti-democratic, and even anti-government "people's militia" types needs to be stopped.

"Distrusts the government, but also works for it?"

Maybe not from the extremist/militia standpoint you mention, but in general people meeting your above statement are the type of people you want making the laws. They realize the potential abuses and should hopefully be creating safeguards against them (without wholly undermining the desired function). The people who blindly trust are the ones who create a system rife for future abuse to occur.

To be clear, the person in question does not distrust the government because they have a strong commitment to liberty. They distrust the government because they're not the ones wearing the boot.

Nobody actually knows who the person in question is yet, right? Besides (allegedly) the source from these articles. So where does this confidence come from?

Assuming the comments in the video are correct, it does sound like they would oppress certain groups of people if they had the power.

Sure, you can assume all sorts of things. You can assume he's actually hitler himself, or maybe putin. Or he's an ideologically pure saint. What does it matter?

The only difference seems to be whether people will feel good or bad about the (probably severe) consequences that will be coming for this person, which doesn't seem like the interesting part of this story.

Lol OK. Please add to the discussion and not just "assume" everything is a lie to derail it.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear.

I'm not saying it's a lie. I'm saying you can speculate that the person matches whatever archetype you want, and you might even be right. The question is: is that important for anything other than feeling satisfied that one of the bad guys is gonna face justice?

It just seems like a distraction.

This discussion was about the idea that people who have some minor level of distrust of the government would likely make better laws because they would build in protections and not assume the people in power would be benign. Another commenter posted that the individual in this article would likely not fit that model as their comments indicate there are specific groups they would oppress if given the power.

These points are important to investigate what kinds of people should be working in various capacities of government to prevent leaks, abuses of power, etc - which is related to the article.

That is one thing that this thread seems to be about, and I agree with your first point in the thread. My point is that this is all premature.

The foundations of the discussion are just some speculation about the leakers character, so it's a lot of wasted words until more is known conclusively.

Which by the way, whether the leaker turns out to be a monster or a saint, the coverage of him was never going to be anything other than negative. You don't embarass power and then get a puff piece for it. Why else would the headline include that he's a gun enthusiast? You're not meant to like this guy.

Which is not to say that he's going to end up being a sympathetic character. Whether he is a villain or not, he's going to be painted as one.

"The foundations of the discussion are just some speculation about the leakers character, so it's a lot of wasted words until more is known conclusively."

It's not really speculation when you're taking their own statements found on video. And either way is at least a theoretical example to answer the original question.

We have a brief description of a video that we haven't seen (right? I haven't seen it anyway). Even if you had the actual video, it could be easily edited to tell a specific story, or just be out of context.

The guy absolutely could turn out to be a racist. There is nothing but hearsay so far though, and the kind you should absolutely expect in this scenario to make you dislike the leaker.

> Distrusts the government, but also works for it? I'd call that a mole. The decades-long infiltration of the military by openly racist, anti-democratic, and even anti-government "people's militia" types needs to be stopped.

As to the original question, this is the part I'm reacting to: that the guy is openly racist and anti democratic is very thinly substantiated so far, but people are very ready to believe it.

There's a healthy skepticism, which I agree can be beneficial, and then there's a loathing as blind as any obedience or conformity can be. "Government is always the problem" or Reagan's "most terrifying words" if not outright QAnon/InfoWars insanity. This particular doofus seems to fall squarely into the second camp, not only undermining government function but putting lives at risk in the process. The efforts of white supremacists in particular to stuff the military (and law enforcement) with their members have been well documented for many years.

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/dismantling-white-suprema...

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-report-white-supremacist...

As I said, it needs to stop. Even military leadership agrees.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/pentagon-report-warns-...

I'd imagine that in some cases, the distrust of the government is actually a result of working for it (IIRC that's what happened with Snowden)

>Distrusts the government, but also works for it? I'd call that a mole.

I'd call that a reaction to knowing how the sausage is made.

In US they call it a Founding Father. :D

"The origins of the leaks on Thug Shaker Central was first reported on Sunday by the Bellingcat"

Ok my warning alarm is going off. If you don't know Bellingcat has been at the center of some very shady assertions on "intel" they gathered, and thus I find this coming from them to be highly suspicious. I would caution people to not jump to conclusions on this one till more evidence is out, and keep in mind Bellingcat isn't trustworthy.

I thought bellingcat actually had a pretty decent track record, and they typically dump all their findings and their methods. They don't even have a "Controversy" section on wikipedia, which is a half-decent litmus test.

I think they suffer from the same criticism as Wikileaks. They may only report on facts, but picking what facts to publish and pursue can still be politically motivated.

Edit: for instance just looking at their Wikipedia pages, there doesn't seem to be any story that makes the leaders of five-eyes countries look bad, aside from Trump, but I can think of several suspicious things from Trudeau to laptops. I think it is valid criticism to suspect of such a focus around Russia.

The reason why it's focused around russia is that russia have a really bad opsec for a major country. Sometimes they contradict themselves, use the wrong plane picture and manage to fail to remember the limits of plane URSS concieved (the MH17 was what pushed me to follow OSINT accounts btw).

The last one i found egregious was Wagner going to a French FOB in Centrafrique (RCA) (the French army left a day prior) to bury african corpses. In daylight, speaking russian, not checking for camera, not jamming low-altitude drones.

Obviously the French army kept the footage and waited to see who woultd publish the "French army killed locals and buried them" story.

While when you have suspicions about recent USA operations (this leak non-wistanding), you find nothing.

That's why i know for sure nord stream 1 and 2 were not done by Russia (we would have evidence already) and i suspect it's not the US that planned the destruction (or at least not the usual department) because of the boat we saw.

Because of pervasive corruption, they’re also many Russians willing to leak information for a fee…like when Navalny’s team purchased the database of FGS officers sent to protect Putin on his alleged yacht (it’s officially owned by another oligarch but I guess Putin uses it whenever he wishes as the mafia boss).

Please elaborate on what you're talking about if you think it's relevant to the conversation, don't just make vague insinuations. Bellingcat has an extremely good reputation and whatever you're referring to is not well known at all.

Bellingcat's founder basically started OSINT journalism, and most "citizen journalist" documenting protests in France use techniques he shared (Yellow jacket mouvement included).

Bellingcat itself share techniques and tools it use openly. You can think they choose what to report on, but when they do it is liekly to be true, and you always can check yourself.

What i really like is that they give the tools to "do your own research" quite often, and that make them harder to deny.

What? Bellingcat is CIA's laundry service, in what way are they citizen journalists?

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