Discord Leaker Jack Teixeira Pleads Guilty, Seeks Light 11-Year Sentence (arstechnica.com) 50
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jack Teixeira, the National Guard airman who leaked confidential military documents on Discord, agreed Monday to plead guilty, promising to cooperate with officials attempting to trace the full extent of government secrets leaked. Under the plea deal, Teixeira will serve a much-reduced sentence, The Boston Globe reported, recommended between 11 years and 16 years and eight months. Previously, Teixeira had pleaded not guilty to six counts of "willful retention and transmission of national defense information," potentially facing up to 10 years per count. During a pretrial hearing, prosecutors suggested he could face up to 25 years, The Globe reported.
By taking the deal, Teixeira will also avoid being charged with violations of the Espionage Act, The New York Times reported, including allegations of unlawful gathering and unauthorized removal of top-secret military documents. According to prosecutors, it was clear that Teixeira, 22, was leaking sensitive documents -- including national security secrets tied to US foreign adversaries and allies, including Russia, China, Ukraine, and South Korea -- just to impress his friends on Discord -- some of them teenage boys. Investigators found no evidence of espionage. US District Judge Indira Talwani will decide whether or not to sign off on the deal at a hearing scheduled for September 27.
By taking the deal, Teixeira will also avoid being charged with violations of the Espionage Act, The New York Times reported, including allegations of unlawful gathering and unauthorized removal of top-secret military documents. According to prosecutors, it was clear that Teixeira, 22, was leaking sensitive documents -- including national security secrets tied to US foreign adversaries and allies, including Russia, China, Ukraine, and South Korea -- just to impress his friends on Discord -- some of them teenage boys. Investigators found no evidence of espionage. US District Judge Indira Talwani will decide whether or not to sign off on the deal at a hearing scheduled for September 27.
Dyslexia (Score:5, Funny)
I read that as an 11 Light Year sentence.
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Yeah he's being banished to the star system Alpha Canis Minoris.
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Prison planet? Will he be able to get a shine job for 20 menthol Kools?
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> I read that as an 11 Light Year sentence.
How many parsecs is that? Is it enough for a Kessel run?
Learn from the fat cats (Score:2, Funny)
Just store the secrets in a golf resort bathroom, closet email server, or cover the folders with sticky ice-cream in a Corvette trunk, and you get off.
Re: Learn from the fat cats (Score:1)
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Or even better, put them into a coffin claiming it's your ex-wife and instead of a cemetery, bury it on your property. Can be dug out when needed.
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"Hey Eric, time to mow your mom."
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Well there is a difference between carelessly storing secrets and purposefully broadcasting them to the universe.
And you don't think Trump did not do both? [nbcnews.com] Trump cannot shut up as he has no filter even when it comes to national secrets.
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He likely did. The problem isn't that he did or didn't. The problem is that the prosecutions aren't serious. Whether they are intended to be or not they give the appearance of being partisan. Part of that is there are a series of other national figures going back decades that were not prosecuted for doing things just as damaging. And if any of these people weren't powerful then the very least of what any of them did is guaranteed prison for any normal person.
Either they should all go to jail or none sh
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No former president has ever spent 18 months deceiving, playing games with and then flat lying to the National Records office when their return was requested.
No former president has ever been caught storing such information in completely unsecured premises when a search warrant was finally served - not coincidentally, one may surmise, just two weeks before an international golf tournament f
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Sigh... how about a former senator or vp?
Whatever....
You totally missed the entire thing with your tds rant.
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Same goes for former senators and VPs. Might be time to stop worshipping a criminal
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Biden and Pence each discovered a small number of documents, among tens of thousands that had passed through their possession, in their homes (which are not public spaces) and immediately returned them. Among Hillary's 40000 emails were a total of two or three that were marked, after they were sent, as "confidential" - the lowest classification - and one, a list of State
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Nicely summarized.
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The MagaDolts interpret everything as partisan if it reflects badly on Dear Leader. And the GQP no longer believes in democracy. They did until that doofas explained to them what "victims" they were and convinced them that tearing everything down was the only recourse or their guns would be taken. It isn't as though they can think for themselves.
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Sigh.. yes yes yes those other guys are all stupid animals and your team is enlightened and beautiful. You didn't read a damned thing I wrote and jammed the reply button before the page was even fully loaded. Knee-jerk about guns and democracy and blah blah blah not in this thread. You missed out.
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The MagaDolts interpret everything as partisan if it reflects badly on Dear Leader. And the GQP no longer believes in democracy. They did until that doofas explained to them what "victims" they were and convinced them that tearing everything down was the only recourse or their guns would be taken. It isn't as though they can think for themselves.
The problem is you literally think only one side is doing it, than handwaving it away when your side does it. Classified documents being stolen? Attacks on government buildings? Harassing politicians? Both are doing it on lies as well.
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The prosecutions are very serious and indictments related to taking classified documents, storing them, allowing unauthorised person to handle them, showing documents to unauthorised persons, hiding some even after demands for their return, making false statements, entering into a conspiracy & obstruction. Some of the indictments are prima facie and his conspiracy & obstruction of their return demonstrate actual criminal intent.
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I can't answer for what was going on when you were a kid. I was doing this stuff roughly 10 years ago dealing with WMD and they were fucking tight. No excuses, no bullshit, no errors, no nothing.
I say intent is irrelevant for the baseline "do up to 20 years" line because that's what our training said. None of us fucked anything up while I was there so I can't say what would have actually happened but the security guys at my facility were serious as all Hell and we knew not to play around with them. From
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I found the Top Secret stuff to be rather boring. Most such items were classified like that to avoid revealing sources or detailed specifications. Most Secret dox were boring too, though could be more interesting after massaging by analysts. I do remember seeing a couple of juicy reports, one about a current event, and another that I didn't see in open sources for twenty years.
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I can't answer for what was going on when you were a kid. I was doing this stuff roughly 10 years ago dealing with WMD and they were fucking tight. No excuses, no bullshit, no errors, no nothing.
I'm glad to hear that those responsibilities were taken seriously. When SAC was disbanded I wondered about the loss of institutional culture related to security. (Though SAC had its issues, too.)
I was in DOD police once at a munitions depot. We patrolled a large area of bunkers, checked the lock on every bunker every shift and otherwise drove our trucks around the back roads of the nature preserve surrounding the bunkers. A nice gig while it lasted. I'd rate security to be about medium.
But we had no access
Re:Learn from the fat cats (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Actually, there isn't a difference in 99% of cases.
I've been through security training including document handling. They don't give a shit if you did it intentionally, by mistake, ignorance or were just tired that day. If you fuck up secure documents (and you're not powerful) the following will happen in roughly this order: your security clearance is pulled, you're fired, you're arrested, you're doing up to 20 years in federal penitentiary.
That's baseline fuck up.
Doing it intentionally adds espionage charges which may or may not add additional time and in theory can rise to the level of treason and get you executed. Most likely it will just get you that full 20 years.
Where do you people get this idea that intent matters? It does not. False. The laws around documents do not give you a gimme for carelessness. Where I worked we were all super paranoid about doing everything exactly by the book every single fucking time because fed pen was not a good future.
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Like most things human there are different degrees of fuck-uppery. The biggest breach that I was aware of during my time in the AF was a staff sgt. who left a secured bag of intercept tapes in the locked trunk of a courier vehicle for a short period of time. He was good at his job and very serious, and about the last person any of us would have expected to do something like that. Our crews had hushed conversations with the sentiment of "There but for the grace of God go I", but there were no immediate impac
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Except that Trump purposefully stole documents, even conspiring to hide some of them after receiving a subpoena for their return.
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Or stuff it in your sock on your way to the shredder.
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Let's just say the recent batch of Presidents, VP's, and Presidential candidates keep fucking up the handling of classified materials. I wonder if Putin is pouring IQ-lowering poison into the DC water.
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seems like this guy was just trying to impress his friends on Discord. That doesn't sound like a whistleblower to me.
It's not [oversight.gov].
A whistleblower is an employee who discloses information that the individual reasonably believes is evidence of gross mismanagement; gross waste of funds; an abuse of authority; a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety; or a violation of law, rule, or regulation.
He posted the information in a public forum and was tracked down by law enforcement. No one on the inside disclosed who the person was posting the information.
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This is an example of the terrible whistle-blower laws
Whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning exposed serious crimes.
What illegal activity did Teixeira expose?
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> Snowden and Manning exposed serious crimes.
One can argue they simultaneously legitimately exposed war crimes, but also committed a crime by unnecessarily doxing some people. Their arrow was wider than the proverbial target. So should we cut them in half, send one half to jail and give a hero's trophy to the other half?
Re:Whistleblower protection (Score:4, Interesting)
Snowden offered to delay publication to give the Feds time to redact anything that might expose informants.
The Feds refused.
The U.S. government threw their informants under the bus just so they could twist the facts and say that Snowden was a "bad guy".
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What illegal activity did Teixeira expose?
The sick amount of pwnage he had over randos on the Internet. That amount of manhood he displayed over them should be illegal. . . according to people who never grew up into adults.
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This is an example of the terrible whistle-blower laws in the US and why they need to be strengthened immediately.
He wasn't a whistleblower, he was a dumbass who wanted to impress his friends by sharing critical intel about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I don't know if Snowden's leaks actually got anyone killed, but this guy's leaks certainly did.
Who's Got A Secret (Score:4, Funny)
For some reason the guy that ignored a solemn oath to America thought that internet "friends" would keep a secret?
That community—which The Times found was "fixated on weapons, mass shootings, and shadowy conspiracy theories"—was expected not to share the documents. Ultimately, Bellingcat found that Teixeira's friends spread the documents widely, first to other Discord servers, then to Telegram, 4Chan, and Twitter (now called X).
It's getting to be that the only Americans who can keep an oath nowadays are ones who want to tear it down.
A National Guard plebe shouldn't have this stuff (Score:1)
Whatever the punishment here, that a person of this status had access to information at this level is unacceptable. That's not one kid bro just feeling his oats and violating an oath. It's a serious sign of systemic negligence.