In connection with a significant leak of classified Pentagon information, the FBI arrested a US Air Guard member on Thursday, April 13.
The Arrest
As per CNN, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts National Guard (a branch of the Air Force), was taken into custody. Teixeira is the head of a private chat group on the widely used social media platform Discord for gamers, where he traded classified papers with like-minded individuals.
Members of this group hail from Latin America, Asia, and the United States. Teixeira bragged that he was an exceptional shooter and had access to top-secret government data, according to the narratives of the group members. He first explained to the group what was in the papers he had access to before taking pictures of them and posting them to the chat.
The Pentagon described the disclosures as “a deliberate criminal act.” Pat Ryder, a spokesman for the Pentagon, declined to respond to queries from media on the arrest, citing a US Justice Department investigation.
The Leak
The media reported a significant Pentagon data breach on April 7, 2023. The material that was made public included information about the Ukrainian counteroffensive. At the same time, information on the losses incurred by Russia and Ukraine during the war was drastically altered in one of the “leaked” documents.
The leak of Pentagon material is also being debated in Ukraine because it was specifically about the conflict. Kirill Budanov, the director of the Main Intelligence Directorate, claimed that this “leak” could only be advantageous for Russia. However, this will have little effect on the actual outcomes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
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