Jack Teixeira, suspected of leaking Pentagon secrets, has been formally charged.
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He is charged on counts: unauthorized storage and transmission of information about the national defense, as well as unauthorized deletion and storage of classified documents.
Teixeira had a state secret clearance, which he received in 2021. However, to obtain this clearance, the military had to sign a lifetime non-disclosure agreement. He should have known that violating this agreement would result in criminal prosecution.
According to investigators, he published documents in a private chat on the popular Discord platform among gamers. The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN found out some details of his biography.
“Angle” tells what is known about the 21-year-old intelligence officer of the US Air National Guard, Jack Teixeira.
He joined the guard in 2019 and began his career as a junior specialist in cyber transport systems. Even at the beginning of his career, Teixeira had a fairly high level of access to classified information: he was an IT specialist in charge of military communications networks and ensuring their protection.
Teixeira’s friends say they see him as neither a political activist nor a whistleblower. Why, then, would an aviator of relatively low rank, without any obvious motivation, need to post online documents of an extremely sensitive nature?
Jack grew up in the Providence suburb of Rhode Island in New England. He graduated from high school there in 2020. His father served in the US Air Force. Her parents divorced when she was still a child. Teixeira was a fan of the Boston Celtics basketball team and loved to ride SUVs and had two dogs. Teixeira’s classmates interviewed by CNN said he was a quiet child. He had few friends.
Teixeira was interested in “everything related to the military” since childhood – he carried books about weapons with him, and sometimes came to school in a camouflage uniform. In October 2017, the day after the Las Vegas massacre, he showed up to school wearing an AR-15 t-shirt that was used by the killer.
Many classmates were wary of Jack Teixeira. According to one former student, Jack’s behavior “made him nervous” but did not seem so dangerous that “people saw the need to report him” to the school authorities. Some classmates also pointed out that Teixeira made comments that they considered racist.
Immediately after graduation, Teixeira joined the armed forces – he even missed the graduation ceremony for basic training at the Air Force Base in Texas, writes The New York Times.
In 2019, he joined the 102nd Reconnaissance Wing of the National Guard, an air force based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In his record, writes The Washington Post, there were no thanks, with the exception of the Air Force Meritorious Service Medal, which is awarded to most pilots.
According to CNN, Teixeira’s most recent official position is as an associate at Cyber Transport Systems. This is a company affiliated with the Air Force, whose specialists monitor the performance of communication networks.
What level of clearance he had for information is still unknown, writes The Washington Post. But, according to the publication, he could access the internal network of the Department of Defense, which is used to exchange top-secret data. Thus, he could have been able to read documents with the level of secrecy that turned out to be in the origins.
According to one of his acquaintances, Teixeira wanted people whom he considered friends to receive information free from propaganda, in particular, about the war between Russia and Ukraine.
According to this acquaintance, Teixeira believes that Russia and Ukraine are countries in which “there should be more in common than what separates them.”
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.