US Military Intelligence Discord Leak

[on the rocks]

Last week, it was discovered that someone had posted classified US Military intelligence information on a Discord server used by a small group of racist gamers.  In just a matter of days, a 21 year old IT dude working for the Air National Guard in Massachusetts was arrested and is facing charges under the Espionage Act.

It's an interesting story and quite the embarrassment for the US, especially considering this man, Jack Teixiera, seems to have only done this to impress his dumbass gamer friends.  Like seriously?

Anyway, what I'm interested in is the lessons one can glean about OPSEC from this case as it applies to our circles on the darkweb.  You see, this Discord server was hosting this classified information for over a month and no one had a clue.  That is, until one of the members of this small Discord group reposted some of this classified shit elsewhere.  Only then did it whip around the internet and come to anyone's attention.

I look at how that transpired and I could not help but draw the parallel between how that went down and a common way pedophiles and child pornographers get busted.  I'm thinking about this in the context of privately traded child pornography.  A few people start making CP and sharing it with a couple of "trusted" friends from their CP community.  And because of the insular nature of their tight trading group, they get complacent in terms of keeping their content free of identifying information.  Eventually, the inevitable happens and someone in the private trading group cannot resist the temptation to share this juicy content elsewhere.

And once that happens, it whips around the darkweb in a matter of days.  And if it has identifying features in it, LEA picks up the trail and may eventually find the producer.  Sound familiar?  It's the same dynamic of ego stroke in both situations.  Person A wants to impress persons B thru E so he does something super illegal and shows it off.  Everyone is impressed and praises person A.  But that content is so good that person C can't resist taking that content and using it to impress persons F thru Z so all of them will stroke person C's ego and tell him how cool he is for sharing that shit.  Teixeira was sucked in by the exact same dynamic that a child porn producer can fall victim to.

So lesson 1: Beware the ego stroke.  Stay fucking humble lest your zeal for approval lead to complacency.


The next giant lesson I can glean from this case is how the suspect made zero effort to conceal his identity among this group of gamers/racism shitposters.  Most of the dweebs in this group were using their real names and since it was Discord, they were signed up with real emails linked to their real personas.  So it was trivial for the FBI to find him out since he basically told every in his group, "Hi, I'm Jack and I work for the Air Force in Massachussets."  Obviously they didn't start as a group trafficking in illegal content so they wouldn't have thought to hide their true identities from each other, but nevertheless, it's a good demonstration of how much easier it is for LEA to find people when they reveal identifying information about themselves.

Lesson 2: Loose lips sink ships.  Or rather, loose fingers lead to the FBI breaking down your fucking door.


This next lesson shouldn't be a shocker, but is worth mentioning anyway.  Discord was fully cooperative with the FBI in this investigation and gave them whatever they needed.  The phrase "private Discord server" should be completely detached from any real sense of privacy in your mind.  Just think about if this was a private Discord server hosting child pornography (and I'm sure there are private Discord servers hosting CP right now, just waiting to be busted).  It might very well have lasted as long or longer than this top secret shit, but in the end, it would be found.  And the people who put it there would go to jail.  So under no circumstance should anyone give in to the temptation to engage in on topic activity on a platform like Discord.  I don't care how many young people are using it and what they are doing there, Discord is not a safe place.  Treat it like it is radioactive for on topic.

Lesson 3: Never trust big tech when they use the word "privacy"  They do not care about your actual privacy and will give LEA the keys to everything if they ask.

Those are my big takeaways from this damning intelligence leak as it pertains to us.  I have plenty of other thoughts about the politics of it, both domestically and globally, but maybe some other time.  I will note that this Discord group was mostly teen boys, so I couldn't help but get a vibe of someone trying to be the king of the losers here.  The townie who hangs out with high schoolers after he graduates because those are the only dudes who can't see what a pathetic loser he is.  Except instead of hanging around the bowling alley, they're online trading retarded anti-semetic and racist bullshit because they're too stupid to understand how much they've brainwashed themselves.
Future Fascists of America

[FindingRest]

That's a pretty wild story. I don't really keep up with the news or modern trends anymore, but I think it's horrifyingly hilarious how the US puts so much effort into cyber security, just for a bunch of random idiots to post it on the web for attention. The fact that it was their own people makes that much more mind numbing:lol

[dragon]

Discord states clearly in their ToS that they fully cooperate with LEA and their moderators will turn over any CSAM they find without hesitation. they also say they will report any evidence of grooming behavior.

https://discord.com/guidelines JS not needed.

[BiPeadl]

It is a reminder that comes at a good time for me... Don't get too loose, shy. Strangers are still strangers and everyone can turn out to be an enemy. Certain recent events will surely make me remember that.

[And I Love Her]

I'm always happy to see these leaks, as I don't trust the US government to make "classified" decisions in any way, shape, or form.

However, this story really is bizarre. Like you said, he seems to have just been trying to impress his friends. Just...why?

[LikelyHuman]

This kind of thing just makes me wonder how much illegal shit goes through Discord's servers all the time unnoticed. It reminds me of that thing that happened with PornHub, where someone accused them of having been hosting loads of illegal content, except the difference is that PH was notified by victims of the presence of their videos and they couldn't really do much about it until they started requiring accounts to be verified users. Also, can I just say that PH has fucking sucked ever since? It feels like pre-PH where now all you see is part of the video and have to pay to see the whole thing.

Anyway, back to Discord, you've got to figure they could do something more proactive, but just don't because there's no one holding them to it. It's very much a, "We will act on any reported CSAM, but we're damn sure not going to scan our servers for it proactively," kind of thing. In this case it's confidential information, so maybe not as easy to find, but it really shows that they're asleep at the wheel

Also makes me think of the Chelsea Manning leak and when Adrian Llamo snitched them out. I don't really remember what the contents of that leak were, but I seem to remember people defending it because it showed some things the military were up to that it shouldn't have been. However, from the sounds of it, that was more just incidental to Manning's motive for leaking it. This kind of seems like the same thing, but with no body misconstruing it into some kind of altruism.

[Malaikah]

Social media can make youngsters do crazy stuff.
This recent leak proves that it's not just tiktokers or high schoolers who do crazy things it can be anyone regardless of their qualifications or profession.
This is so different from what happened in Bradley Manning's case.
Not sure if it's the world that is getting dumber with the advancement in technology or it's the corporate America that is making it dumber.

[Katou]

Lesson 3: Never trust big tech when they use the word "privacy"  They do not care about your actual privacy and will give LEA the keys to everything if they ask.

Those are my big takeaways from this damning intelligence leak as it pertains to us.  I have plenty of other thoughts about the politics of it, both domestically and globally, but maybe some other time.  I will note that this Discord group was mostly teen boys, so I couldn't help but get a vibe of someone trying to be the king of the losers here.  The townie who hangs out with high schoolers after he graduates because those are the only dudes who can't see what a pathetic loser he is.  Except instead of hanging around the bowling alley, they're online trading retarded anti-semetic and racist bullshit because they're too stupid to understand how much they've brainwashed themselves.
Future Fascists of America

Social media can make youngsters do crazy stuff.
This recent leak proves that it's not just tiktokers or high schoolers who do crazy things it can be anyone regardless of their qualifications or profession.
This is so different from what happened in Bradley Manning's case.
Not sure if it's the world that is getting dumber with the advancement in technology or it's the corporate America that is making it dumber.

Yeah, People also became products, social networks no longer need to create products, they need a lot of resources, factories, they just take something ready-made, human beings, bodies are already ready but the brain is a problem, so they started just taking out the brain, brains don't eat, don't drink, have no function in the consumer industry, but then they found a problem, people without brains don't work for them, so they create artificial intelligences and put them in people's cavities.

People are exposing their lives and when someone doesn't do the same they imagine it's because they're hiding something, and of course really, they're hiding themselves from this madness.

[Maghellanes]

Although five months late, I want to thank OnTheRocks for reporting and analyzing this information and to give this useful topic a bump to be more visible to anybody who might benifit.  To me one of the benefits of the PSC is to remind and instruct each other to exercize proper caution.

[nyarla]

 I've watched a video that talked about that case, his leaks were mostly just some minor army info. The guys was in the military and was using this as leverage for cloud with his racist friends.