Explained | What Jack Teixeira's game of Pentagon (de)classifieds means for internet surveillance

The 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a newly minted member of the U.S. Air Force, is now the global face of the most explosive document leak of the decade. The suspected leaker of hundreds of photographs of highly classified U.S. military documents, Teixeira comes from a family of US defence veterans. So far, the leaks have revealed secrets about gaps in Ukrainian air defences amid its war with Russia. The leaks are also a damning exposéof the United States as it revealed how Washington D.C. spies on countries it officially deems as its allies and partners.

Following the leaks, the Biden administration will reportedly overhaul the way it surveils the internet.

Texeira's youth can be understood from the fact that the boy was born just two years before Mark Zuckerberg released Facebook in 2004, and has been raised through a period when the internet's becoming a global town square has defined elections, pop cultures and geopolitics all over the world.

The young man of boyish looks was assigned the task to manage and troubleshoot computers and communications systems for the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, according to the US Air Force. Teixeira has been charged with unauthorised removal of classified national defence information.

The footage captured by news helicopters circling over Teixeira's family home in Dighton, Massachussettes, showed him holding his hands behind his head as he was led away by law enforcement authorities.

Jack Teixeira: Devout Catholic who had racist outbursts

A friend of Jack Teixeira's widely cited in the US media, described him as patriotic.In the videos of Teixeira on a Discord server, he is seen shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle.

The friend said he met Teixeira before 2020 on a Discord server where they talked about guns and libertarian politics, and bonded over their shared interest in Glock handguns and Catholicism.

Later, the friend joined a new Discord server that Teixeira started called Thug Shaker Central, which became home to a group of about two dozen people, including many teenagers.

ALSO WATCH |Pentagon Intel Leak: Ukrainian air defence in peril

Teixeira has been described as a "pretty normal guy" outside the server.

He had a "slight temper" and was "more of a mentor than a leader," the friend is quoted as saying by the Washington Post.

Jack Teixeira and war in Ukraine

Teixeira reportedly started sharing classified documents on the Discord server around February 2022, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. He saw it as a "depressing" battle between "two countries that should have more in common than keeping them apart," reports in the US media say.

Sharing the classified documents was meant "to educate people who he thought were his friends and could be trusted" free from the contested information on the internet, Teixeira's friend cited in the U.S. media said.

"It was pretty obnoxious to see kids who grew up in the suburbs argue about a conflict an ocean away," he added.

Teixeira played a game of (de)classifieds

Photographs of some of the documents first appeared on Discord app channels focused on the Minecraft computer game and followers of a minor YouTube celebrity, known as wow_mao, according to Bellingcat.

The photographed documents then eventually made their way to the image board 4Chan, then pro-Russian Telegram channels and Twitter. The New York Times first reported on the documents last week.

What next?

The Biden administration is now looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents, allegedly originating from Jack Teixeira's Discord server, circulating online for weeks. according to a senior administration official and a congressional official briefed on the matter.

"Nobody is happy about this," a senior official in the Biden administration was quoted as saying by NBC News.

The U.S. intelligence is now looking at finding new ways to scrub platforms like Discord in search of relevant material to avoid a similar leak in the future, a congressional official is cited as saying by the news outlet.

The U.S. deems monitoring and watching a public chatroom as fair game of intelligence gathering. However, law enforcement agencies don’t have the legal authority to monitor a private online chatroom without probable cause.

At the same time, the US law enforcement authorities balance national security with civil liberties.

Jack Teixeira joined the Air National Guard in September 2019 and worked as a cybersecurity systems journeyman, a position in which he held the highest level security clearance granted by the federal government for top secret information. He is due to appear in a Boston federal courtroom on Friday, April 14.

WATCH WION LIVE HERE