Discord Leaker Sentenced To 15 Years In Prison (nbcnews.com) 81
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it online, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts announced. Teixeira received the sentence before Judge Indira Talwani in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In March, the national guardsman pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. He was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in April 2023 and has been in federal custody since mid-May 2023.
According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed classified documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform mostly used by online gamers. He began sharing the documents in or around 2022. A document he was accused of leaking included information about providing equipment to Ukraine, while another included discussions about a foreign adversary's plot to target American forces abroad, prosecutors said. [...] While the documents were discovered online in March 2023, Teixeira had been sharing them online since January of that year, according to prosecutors.
According to court documents, Teixeira transcribed classified documents that he then shared on Discord, a social media platform mostly used by online gamers. He began sharing the documents in or around 2022. A document he was accused of leaking included information about providing equipment to Ukraine, while another included discussions about a foreign adversary's plot to target American forces abroad, prosecutors said. [...] While the documents were discovered online in March 2023, Teixeira had been sharing them online since January of that year, according to prosecutors.
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole private email server was pretty bad, but there's no evidence she willfully showed people classified documents that weren't allowed to see them.
Versus, we actually have audio recordings of a certain orange man admitting to showing classified documents to his loyal subjects. Also 'lock and key' is laughable as it's been proven random people can just walk around mar a lago and pretty much go wherever they want.
If you want to apply the rule of law, you really should apply it evenly to everyone, not just your favorite con man.
Re: Summed up in rough code... (Score:3, Insightful)
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You can be prosecuted for mishandling classified information even by accident. The fact that Clinton had any classified data on her home server at all already amounted to a violation of the law.
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If he said something wasn't classified, then it wasn't.
Why were the documents still so classified that they had to create a special location for the trial?
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Its not a new thing, classification removes the chance for oversight.
They set their email add ons to classified for HR interactions. HR interactions while private in no way are Government State assets to be shielded from congressional oversight. Travel expenses of government employees, cant audit those, they are classified. The government
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, Trump, as President, _was_ the final authority on classified, since classified is an executive branch animal. If he said something wasn't classified, then it wasn't. If he gave it to someone to read, then it was "authorized" since he was the "authority."
Bullshit. Another moron who has no clue what they're talking about trying to defend the convicted felon. No president has the unilateral right to declassify anything simply by saying so. There are well documented processes and procedures outlined by Congress [americanbar.org] on how any document can become declassified. They can say they want to declassify something, but then the processes kick in.
And no, simply "thinking" about declassifying something doesn't declassify it.
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the same gymnastics that leads them to conclude the 2020 election was rigged despite incredibly thorough review by our judiciary and zero supporting evidence of any validity. Or that the Hattian community in Springfield are all out eating people's pets despite every level of city government from the cops up denying there's a problem. Or that the Jan 6 rioters are all innocent because they saw a security guard open a door for one. Never mind all the footage of them bear spraying and beating cops (in other words, video of them committing obvious crimes), that footage just magically goes away.
Trump has turned much of the Republican party into a cult and just like good cult members they'll believe anything they're told.
Re: Summed up in rough code... (Score:2)
I would say that improper handling of classified documents and data should be universally punished without regard for the circumstances.
If you knowingly pass classified government data on a private email server running in your closet, you should go to jail. If you store government documents in a seedy resort, irrespective of which room it is found in, you should go to jail. If you store classified government documents in your garage next to your classic Corvette, you should go to jail.
Perhaps it is time to
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet no charges were brought.
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that Clinton had any classified data on her home server at all already amounted to a violation of the law.
She turned everything over to the State Department. Which was the standard practice at the time. Now days, the standard practice is to lie about what you have, drag your feet, and otherwise delay handing it over.
The whole story took years to really shake out, because of the political scandal and hyped media coverage on it. In my opinion, this paragraph from wikipedia boils it down the essentials.
The FBI investigation found that 110 messages contained information that was classified at the time it was sent. Sixty-five of those emails were found to contain information classified as "Secret;" more than 20 contained "Top-Secret" information. Three emails, out of 30,000, were found to be marked as classified, although they lacked classified headers and were only marked with a small "c" in parentheses, described as "portion markings" by Comey. He added it was possible Clinton was not "technically sophisticated" enough to understand what the three classified markings meant which is consistent with Clinton's claim that she wasn't aware of the meaning of such markings.
The part I bolded is typical of our representatives in Congress. Most of them don't know what they are doing and are not trained or disciplined enough to handle the information they legally have access to.
The outcome applies to Clinton as well as any other members of our government, such as Trump.
FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI investigation had concluded that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but recommended that no charges be filed because Clinton did not act with criminal intent, the historical standard for pursuing prosecution.
To avoid seeming like a witch hunt. The DOJ needs to have some belief that there was criminal intent. Technically they don't have to prove the intent (varies depending on what code you have violated). But that standard for pursuing prosecution should be applied equally, and no special exceptions for political party or position of government (be it a Senator or President).
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Amounted to at least four violations, per piece of classified information.
Removing it from the secure system.
Removing the notice that it was classified.
Putting it on an insecure network (the internet).
Not reporting the breach (which is mandatory).
And there's absolutely no question that classified information was compromised, to the tune of over a hundred times, so a minimum of 400-500 federal crimes. (There's little question that it was accessed repeatedly by foreign powers, as well, despite what the Orange
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Then Why isn't she in jail?
trump used his corrupt DOJ to "go after" her after again in 2018, after she was initially cleared. They still had nothing.
The Justice Department has reopened its investigation into former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton [observer.com]
The Justice Department has reopened its investigation into former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. A source close to Attorney General Jeff Sessions told The Daily Beast that
Re: Summed up in rough code... (Score:2, Troll)
Liberals are both completely incompetent, yet so smart, scheming, and powerful that they control everything and canâ(TM)t be stopped.
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Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
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Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:5, Informative)
Trump was not charged for having confidential materials on his property.
He was charged for not returning them when ordered to and lying about it.
Hillary may well have had confidential docs on her private email server , but these where removed as soon as she , or rather her IT person, became aware that they where there and unauthorized. Same with Biden.
There is a vast difference between "Grandma doesnt understand email" and intentionally concealing a breach of national security.
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Trump was not charged for having confidential materials on his property.
He was charged for not returning them when ordered to and lying about it.
Hillary may well have had confidential docs on her private email server , but these where removed as soon as she , or rather her IT person, became aware that they where there and unauthorized. Same with Biden.
There is a vast difference between "Grandma doesnt understand email" and intentionally concealing a breach of national security.
This.
I've worked with parliamentary records in Australia, politicians having files is routine and it's the job of the records dept. to keep track of them (NARA in the US I believe). 999 times out of 1000 it's just a message or email to their staff (usually the Chief Of Staff if it's serious enough to be tracking down) saying "Hi Bob, Minister Wozizfaze booked out these docs for Bill 119932. Do you still need them" and the response will be "yes, we're still using them" but it's usually "no, we'll send th
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Hey! I worked in electronic documents in courts in australia, and its fairly similar. Prosecutors , outside defence lawyers or Judges will need certain documents or files and its assumed they might need to take them with them. Its up to them to return them when finished but more often then not they'll just forget and they need to be gently reminded "return those docs or the judge is going to get medieval on your ass". Though that was quite some time ago and I'd imagine by this point its all electronic docum
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:5, Informative)
rump protected his documents at Mar-A-Lago under lock and key, and they never saw the internet.
The convicted felon had boxes of classified material stored in a bathroom, in a ballroom [cnn.com], his bedroom, and elsewhere, where anyone who had access to the place could see them. He even showed off [factcheck.org] some of the classified documents to people who had no security clearances or reason to see the documents. He then tried to claim he had every right to steal some of the nation's most classified documents and went so far as to move said documents to try and hide them [nbcnews.com] during the investigation. For all we know he was trying to sell the documents to the highest bidder.
Stop your fucking lying.
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You do realize Hillary lost that election don't you? I know people, include me, who didn't vote for her and one of the reasons why we didn't was her poor handling of classified documents.
Re:Summed up in rough code... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know people, include me, who didn't vote for her and one of the reasons why we didn't was her poor handling of classified documents.
And yet, you just voted for a known liar who lied about having classified documents and stored those documents in the open.
Hypocrisy much?
Re: Summed up in rough code... (Score:3)
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Trump: We in the US have big beautiful subs, some might be called b
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It’s good to be the king. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/... [go.com]
If I were US mass media nowadays I could allege you killed baby deer & rabbits when you were a teenager.
My claim does not make it true, but you still have to deal with the bad press coverage about you.
If you had not been asleep during the Trump I presidency you would have recognized that mass media game ramping up even further after he won the election.
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Well, killing baby deer really is bad, there's hardly any meat on them.
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Depends a bit on how big the "baby" is.
Some call a one year old, a baby. But it is obviously not a baby.
Same with a lamb. It is small, but tasty.
Can also be big, in general - especially male - we want to slaughter it before it has matured.
And it depends what you want to achieve. In Germany we still have hunters. If you rent an area for hunting, you are actually obliged to do that.
So you have a nice big 3 year old male deer, and a nice 4 year old female with two kids. Together they destroy stuff that is valu
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Just an FYI:
Deer hunting in the US is oriented towards mature males with horns, unless you win a lottery to get a doe permit females are off limits. Whitetail deer can breed successfully at a year and a half years old, one or two offspring, and they're non-monogamous so one buck can impregnate half a dozen does or more. The result has been that in many areas they're becoming nuisance animals, especially in suburban areas where there isn't enough open space to be able to hunt. (My sister says they love to
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Just an FYI:
Deer hunting in the US is oriented towards mature males with horns, unless you win a lottery to get a doe permit females are off limits.
This is very location dependent. In the state of Tennessee (2024), it's 2-4 antlerless deer per hunter depending on what part of the state you're in. In Kentucky this year, it goes from 0 antlerless deer (in the SE part of the state) to no limit on antlerless deer in the northern and western parts of the state. All of the above relate to modern firearm season, YMMV in other seasons.
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Wow, a hundred years ago they were almost extinct in much of that area because of commercial hunting, that's quite a bounce-back.
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This has always been the case, with a charge of "child molester" being a popular one.
I had a friend who was beset by criminal and civil issues along those lines. It was character assassination.
His employer stood by him and helped with his legal fees.
Ruined his life for some years as people remember "I heard Jim did..." regardless of reality.
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This has always been the case, with a charge of "child molester" being a popular one.
I had a friend who was beset by criminal and civil issues along those lines. It was character assassination.
His employer stood by him and helped with his legal fees.
Ruined his life for some years as people remember "I heard Jim did..." regardless of reality.
You understand my point perfectly.
character assassination is what US mass media has devolved into because they can't make any cogent arguments otherwise.
character assassination exists in many forms in the USA. It may be more prevalent, more overt than racism, misogyny, and age discrimination.
Access? (Score:1)
Since the beginning this story has sounded wrong to me. I realize that the general assumption is that the military is full of incompetents, but in what context could this low-level idiot have possibly had access to some of this stuff? It smells like three day dead fish. The only possibility that makes sense to me is that someone wanted them published, and this moron was their way to do it.
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IT Person. They probably needed a sysadmin and he probably accessed stuff he did not have permission to because he could. Too many people do not understand that "possibility to access" does not imply "permission to access".
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Its pretty clear that there has long been bizare problems with info security within the US military industrial context.
Chelsea manning was a specialist (The rank above private , which you rank into after 2 years as private , I believe [im not an army guy so dont quote me on that]) and was given access to the whole damn lot. How that is even possible is bizare to think about. Why does a low grade analyst need access to private conversations between embassies unrelated to whatever it is they are analysing, pr
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I wonder if they do what a lot of organisations seem to do, instead of having access levels based on rank etc, they just give every IT guy "domain admin" not really realizing what it means. I was hired at a school district on a temporary day by day contract and was given sysadmin rights on day 1. Now a school district isn't military but judging by these stories maybe it's not that far off
Re: Access? (Score:2)
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In a former life, I was a government contractor with a clearance and a CAC and access to one of those Outlook servers. 99.9% of the stuff we exchanged regarding the program I worked on was marked FOUO despite the fact that everyone had to have at least a Secret clearance.
The reason? It would have make everything a massive pain in the ass to deal with if we over classified it. An FOUO document I can keep on my company laptop or lock in my desk as long as I take reasonable precautions. I can transmit an F
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Also, just as an addendum, as the holder of a collateral clearance, you are not supposed to just willy-nilly mark things with a classification without a justification. Only an OCA (original classification authority) can do that. That's people like the president, certain generals like the joint chiefs, the secretary of state or defense, etc. It's not a long list. Everyone else is supposed to be following a site or program policy authorized by an OCA. For contractors that's the DD254 associated with thei
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So like Google having everyone CC their legal team on every email so courts can't get access to them.
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Snowden was an IT contractor who just asked people **IN THE NSA** their username/password AND THEY GAVE IT TO HIM . He personally had access to very little. The Press Corpse want to make him out as some elite hacker, but the reality is that a bunch of people in the NSA appear to be utter morons (I've worked with two ex-NSA staffers, and that was my impression as well).
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So you have no idea about the story. Why give us your ignorant opinion then?
Why complain about things you haven't the slightest clue about?
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but in what context could this low-level idiot have possibly had access to some of this stuff?
What stuff? Define "stuff". Classified documents mean a document has some level of classification, it doesn't necessarily mean it is Top Secret. The vast majority of government documents from the military are classified in some capacity and as such virtually all military personnel have some level of security clearance. Heck most contractors have some level of security clearance as well.
I think the bigger issue in the US government is there aren't sufficient grades of classification to decide who can and can
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Of course the military is full of idiots: it's big.
Basically any large organization regresses towards the mean. Lots of large organizations like to say how they hire better than average, but they don't. The key to successful organizations is to keep achieving with an on average mediocre workforce.
The alternative is small organizations, but they can't do big things, and they have their own inefficiencies as well that are better hidden.
Oh also the military has to be survivable, not in a war sense, but in the
No (Score:1)
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Well, that is "tough in crime", unless it is an important person doing it. Then you can get away with rape, insurrection and a few other things and even get elected by the "tough on crime" morons after you have a felony conviction. Well, at least for the history books, the time when the US Republicans became a complete joke is amply clear.
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So far, only the Republicans have elected a convicted felon to be president, no "insinuation" about it.
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Stop trying to confuse the issue. You people voted a _felon_ to be president, thereby sabotaging prosecution for further crimes, while you claim to be "tough on crime".
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I'd rather be a felon than be Trump. That doesn't help.
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It's funny, you're aware of all that but you aren't aware of the fact that the only direction calls for sentencing and prison reform comes from in this country is from the Democratic side. It's often not pursued by Democratic party politicians though because they worry about being perceived as "soft on crime". It's perceived as a vote loser and maybe it is.
You are correct in pointing out our ridiculous incarceration rate though. While overall I'll take the US over China any day it's absolutely insane that a
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I never said "only righties" lock people up, that's you making shit up. I very specifically said "the only direction reform comes from is Democrats" and I was correct in saying that.
That fact that I said only Democrats have called for reform in this area in recent history does not at all mean I said ALL Democrats are in favor of such. Pay attention to what words mean.
Some questions and observations .. (Score:2, Insightful)
b. Why did Teixeira leak it to discord?
c. What was such information even doing on a computer connected to the Internet. (regardless of whether JWICS was supposed to be a top-secret communication system.)
d. Have they not learned anything from the Manning and SIPRNet leak.
e. How can information remain secret if over a MILLION people have authorized access to it.
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On the broader topic, sure you can restrict access further and further, but that reduces the value you get from it. Something like 9/11 happens and they launch a big congressional investigation to discover why they didn't "connect the dots"... "doesn't anybody around here talk to each other?" It's a difficult tradeoff.
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He did it wrong. (Score:3)
He should just have used warthunder forums like everyone else...
Too much is classified (Score:2)
I couldn't find any specifics as to exactly what documents this guy leaked. And maybe even if they were unclassified, he shouldn't be posting them on some random Discord group.
That said, the US government has a secrecy fetish. I used to have a Top Secret clearance, and a lot of the stuff I saw was completely banal. We don't even need to discuss the merely "secret" or "confidential" material. It's just an automatic reaction: it is easier and safer to over-classify information. The flavor of toothpaste prefe
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The flavor of toothpaste preferred by strategic bomber pilots? "Strategic bomber" --> top secret.
You say that but you'll feel awfully foolish when China disables our strategic air fleet by poisoning Americas supply of cinnamon flavored toothpaste.
Hopefully... (Score:1)