The Discord Leaks (full documentary) | FRONTLINE + @WashingtonPost

[Music] the Pentagon is dealing with the worst leak of US National Security intelligence in many years as a damning Air Force report has made public 15 Airmen are now being disciplined in the investigation of accused leaker Jack txa a special investigation with the Washington Post into the alleged leaker talking to Jack's friends the internet was a huge part of his life he's working in this highly sensitive facility safeguarding the nation SE secrets and then he goes hops onto Discord and it's a racist paranoid anti-semitic free-for-all it's like he's living this double life the chat platform this was a problematic pocket on our service we don't want these people on Discord and the National Security failures should the military vetting process have caught all of these aspects of his personality the vetting system is pretty robust but it's not perfect there were countless missed opportunities and as a result we have one of the worst leak cases in modern times now on front line the Discord leaks this program contains mature content which may not be suitable for all audiences viewer discretion is advised it started on the online chat platform Discord a post by a person known only as [Music] Luca classified us intelligence documents one batch after another documents labeled top secret soon spilled onto social media that's when it made headlines top secret documents about the war in Ukraine have appeared on social media investigations are underway into the leak of classified Pentagon documents the Pentagon is dealing with the Fallout from the worst leak of US National Security intelligence in many years top secret documents show Ukraine's air defense vulnerability after this hit the news we're trying to figure out a the extent of the leak and B obviously who leaked it we were looking into Luca trying to find traces of him across the web Sam Oakford is on the visual forensics team at the Washington Post I got in touch with someone else in this Discord server and we had a video call I know exactly how he got them but I can't in the good consci of my heart just s my friend out like that he was clear that Luca was not the originator of these leaked documents this is this could be useful I guess he showed me what he said were additional documents that hadn't been in the trch that Luca was tied to Shane Harris is a national security reporter at the post Sam sends me a picture that this Source has taken of a document and shared with Sam oh wow okay it's the Chinese spy balloon that had some months earlier drifted over North America and this appears to be a picture taken from above the Spy balloon which means it could only come from a government surveillance platform I thought how does a teenager have access to highly classified documents a few hours later the source called back this is a recording from a call I had at [Music] night that's when this story started the reporters arranged to meet the source in person we're sitting on this park bench and this kid arrives and before we've even had a chance to start introducing ourselves to each other he says so I have this information and I want to give it to you he pops open the laptop and it's pretty clear within a minute or two that this kid has an astonishing range of classified documents the leak was Far bigger than anyone had understood more than 300 pages that included some of the most highly classified information in the US government from Secret Pentagon assessments of the war in Ukraine to Revelations about Iran's nuclear program to scenarios about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan and that's when he starts to tell us the story of a group of friends who he made online during the pandemic in a Discord server that they called Thug Shaker Central and he described one individual who over the course of many months had shared hundreds and hundreds of classified documents as the reporters were returning home with the documents the FBI was closing in on a suspect Jack tashera Jack Douglas Tara Jack tashera the man suspected of leaking highly classified military documents has been found that's him in the red shorts there the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member was taken into custody earlier today this 21-year-old Air National guardman is alleged to have disclosed hundreds of top secret government documents online to his gaming buddies why did he do it how did he do it what drove him who is he over the next 6 months reporters at the Washington Post would investigate Jack tashera's World it largely laed out online our whole team was working on this creating networks basically of people uh based on their social media profiles cuz they interacted in some way with Jack or someone he was connected to Chris dipur specializes in tracking down sources online he worked as an information security engineer at a gaming platform before becoming an investigative reporter at the post the first thing I triy to do was to find a steam Pro Steam is an online gaming Network that is very popular with users on Discord and if we could find his friend list we could start to kind of build out a a network of other users that he was interacting with here's a list of people that both Jack and Mr Luca were friends with out of the the many friend requests that I sent out only a handful actually responded one of those happened to be the user that is named Crow after about a half hour of going back and forth they revealed that they had dated for me that definitely set alarm Bells off what are the odds of you know one of the first people that kind of replies to my random friend request the day of happens to be someone that dated Jack it seemed astronomical that that was actually happening but her story checked out in a series of contacts with Crow the post reporters began to find out more about her and her relationship with Jack toera they met online they were very close during the pandemic I get the feeling that when she's telling this story about Jack she speaking as somebody who also went down some very deep rabbit holes and went to some very dark places she became a Neo-Nazi because of people she met online she wants to tell her story as somebody saying look I made bad choices in my life she agreed to go on camera if we used her online name and her whole face wasn't shown she said she no longer has anything to do with the Neo-Nazi movement no I I don't believe any of that anymore I realized as time went on that those views were just inherently false but before then I realized that it was potentially going to get me killed to stay in those communities is that fear the reason that you don't want to be identified in this interview partially yeah I don't think anyone would seek me out to hurt me but it's better to be safe than sorry Crow says she met Jack to Shera online I think the first time I remember encountering him we were on a server about guns and gear and like Russian stuff uh and I think I asked him some questions about what he was talking about cuz as much as I like guns I don't know as much as some of these people and it got to a point where like I trusted him quite a bit what were some of his just general political views of the day uh he was patriotic he liked America um I guess best way I could Poss describe him would be kind of like a Libertarian he had strong opinions about everything he was not a Neo-Nazi but definitely conservative really supported like gun rights First Amendment rights so it was definitely a plus to me that he was fine with my beliefs he texted me this big long emotional thing uh asking me to dat telling me that I was like the last part of this D I opan world that he liked um he knew everything about my life Crow says they never met in person but they had an online relationship for about a year I think in front of his friends he kind of put on this front of oh I don't really care way more typically masculine and conservative I think he wanted them to think of him pretty like highly but when you're one-on-one with him he was much more of a genuinely like sweet person he loved dragons and dinosaurs and stuff since he was a kid he always wanted to ride a dragon uh and looking back on it like it's kind of childish but you know that was a side of him you never really saw when you were talking to him jack Tara's family would not speak on the record but the post reporters were able to piece together an outline of his childhood Tara grew up in Dion Massachusetts a tranquil corner of the state you see family photos of him when he's little he looks just like a typical ordinary little kid seems to come from a big family here he is playing a game online he looks about 6 years old in this picture he was obsessed as a young kid with military weaponry and hardware and World War II airplanes he was a bright kid by all accounts in middle school he made the Honor rooll we understand he's reasonably close to his parents he lives uh at the home of his mother and stepfather but he's also close with his Dad we know that in middle school he started playing Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto with friends [Music] online he gets to high school and it seems like maybe this is a period where there's significant change in his life and starts to have problems it was a time he would still talk about when he began dating Crow after high school there were many Late Night Calls where he would rant to me about school how much he hated his teacher how much he hated some people and he hated the principal and how he wishes he could have shot up the school um how he should have done it just stuff like that his sophomore year there is an incident at the school where there are two students who say that Jack tells them he has a Molotov cocktail in his backpack and what would they do if he threw one down the hallway the kids are alarmed they go to officials and ultimately the dayon police department investigates this front line and the Washington Post obtained the report of the subsequent police investigation there are witness States statements that a number of the students give that document all of these things that they say that they've heard Jack say including the threats that he's made about killing black people the police meet with Jack and he tries to say I was just talking about a video game ultimately Jack is suspended from school for one day and required to take a psychological risk assessment before return turning to [Music] class we wanted to build a place where you could game talk and ultimately belong so we built Discord and you loved it by the time tashera got into trouble in high school the chat platform Discord was surging in popularity with Gamers you made Discord into a home a place for you and your friends to hang out in Discord was started in 2015 by game developers Jason citen and stanislav veski we came up with this idea of what if we built from scratch an amazing voice and text chat experience for people that play multiplayer video games and and that's what we built it's called Discord it quickly evolved and became a place for users to create communities known as servers with no advertising and little oversight relying largely on users to moderate problematic content it's going to happen at UVA in front of Jefferson statue we're going to March to the monument with the Torches as the company grew it came under Fire when white supremacists began recruiting and organizing on its servers most infamously for the unite the right rally in Charlesville Virginia John Redgrave is discord's head of trust and safety after the Charlottesville riots and the unite the right rally in 2017 it was found that there were people who were organizing on Discord look the unite the right rally was a really challenging moment for Discord I was not part of the company at that time um but it was the impetus for Discord to build a trust and safety team we have 150 million people using Discord every month right that's billions of interactions right so the scale of this challenge is immense the company has defended itself in the wake of the intelligence leaks and the ongoing problems with extremism saying they represent isolated Bad actors on a platform designed for privacy and Community we have taken the stance that um a lot of these spaces are like text messaging your friends and your loved ones and it's inappropriate for us to violate people's privacy and we don't have the level of precision to do so when it comes to detection to me this is we're a city right Discord is a city right we have all these people who are trying to find friends in their city and they're going and you know playing sports right they might be gaming they might be you know uh studying together in any City you are going to have problematic Pockets Sam Oakford tracked down one of Jack Tara's friends from Discord he wanted to be identified by his online name pucky pucky is someone that I heard about very early on took us a long time many many months to track him down and identify him by name and then get in touch and then convince him to meet with us Bucky is now 19 this is the first time he's spoken on camera all right and we're rolling do not disturb there we go what start when you first encountered Discord as a platform I think it was in seventh grade I was still using Skype at that point and my really good friend at the time were like we should ditch Skype because everybody's on Discord I formed a habit of being there a lot texting but also speaking and then June 2020 that's when I joined oxide oxide is a YouTube channel featuring Russian guns body armor and military hardware viewers who like the content can then join a server on Discord oxide Hub which in 2020 had thousands of members including Jack tashera we were stuck inside that summer so we were just all online playing games so I searched for other places to be and then that's what brought me to oxide and Jack was there and we hit it off personally I remember him being he was he was a cool guy and the number of coronavirus cases jumped by nearly 5,000 here in the United States over the past 24 hours as testing has expanded teenagers have really lost out when it comes to peer relationships it was during the early days of the covid pandemic that Jack Tara's friend group was coalescing on Discord Charles says he was around 13 when he met toera on oxide Hub he and one of his parents agreed he could be interviewed on the condition his identity be concealed and we use his middle name I moved to a new school and it had shut down immediately due to co restrictions just hold that for a second actually you can put that in your pocket I had no friends and was locked home and because I was locked at home that led me to Discord and Discord is where I eventually met Jack tashera and after some time you know you play so many games with someone you have so many good moments with those people that you kind of form a bond with them we talked a lot in oxide Hub but it was a big group of people so it wasn't like talking one on-one and you would like occasionally DM them privately but their online conversations had a darker side we took joy in being offensive it was something that made us tighter as friends like us against the world we would talk about how much we hated a race whether that be Jews or or blacks Hispanics or Canadians it could be anything you like dude screw those people and people would be like yeah and whether it was serious or not we didn't care it was funny and that during such a time where we were so far removed from society because of Co it was so easy to fall into that hole of just hating everything a lot of older people don't understand how gross younger people's humor can be and they don't understand just how disturbing younger people's perceptions of what can be joked and not joked about is like many large public Discord servers oxide Hub had its own moderators responsible for policing content at some point oxide's moderation team they want to crack down on offense content offensive for this being racially motivated images memes because it was a public server they didn't want anything too edgy so they started cracking down on this this content and then Pocky uh he made a smaller server and invited a bunch of people who used to be active in the voice chats and then this is where you could say the core members became solidified with each other 99% of my time was in there what was the role that Jack played in the group I mean he was pretty well-liked by everyone um he was someone that if you saw them like join the VC and they were just sitting in there alone it would fill up really quickly with other people just wanting to talk to him he was an awesome guy to hang out around like anytime he entered the room like mood changed like stuff's going down this is going to be fun we're going to have a good night after the George Floyd protests dominated the news in the summer of 2020 the content on Puck's server became even more racist and violent like in the calls people would be in their military gear yelling a lot about black people about police um there was some of like just keep burning stuff down you know there was one day where people joined the call and just started doing push-ups to prepare for like the end times adjust Kipper this is a screen recording of the group gaming together maybe I should go the country club route Jack toera used his online name the Excalibur effect unlucky Mr zombie shot Gore was posted you you'd post videos of Jihadi you know beheadings and things like that or cartel killings you be like dude look at this guy getting his head chopped off it was it was cool what do you think about this now we're talking about I'm definitely not proud of of it at all it's embarrassing and it's quite frankly humiliating to speak about it now but I'm willing to do you think that the community Jack was in on Discord nudged him closer to making this bad decision that he ultimately made yeah I think so yeah I think it was just the whole like psychology of being in an online community like that I mean there's like a term chronically online where you lose touch of how interacting with people in real life is and like real consequences and real issues in the world those just go away in the summer of 2020 Jack graduates high school that's of course the first year of the pandemic he actually skips High School graduation because he's off to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base he goes on to start taking the coursework that he need needs to become a Cyber Transport specialist it was a low-level it job but it required a security clearance and a background check he was a little bit worried they were going to in their interview bring up hey we found this Discord account or we found this Discord server at that time he did become less active in Discord and he was very worried about keeping the things he was doing private and safe what was he specifically worried that the background investigation might turn up with regards to Discord um there was a lot of like racist talk on that server there was a lot of talk of killing ATF agents killing different government officials committing acts of terrorism things that are probably not great for someone in the military to be saying so I think that's probably what he was worried about but deser was investigated and ultimately approved for security clearance by the Department of Defense one big question we have right now is how did Jack Desir get a security clearance I mean if we're looking at Jack desira and all the things that he posted online the racist violent comments the memes the imagery and the fact that he ultimately is accused of leaking hundreds of classified documents it's like okay well wait a minute there should have been red flags along the way the Department of Defense declined to give an interview or answer questions about Jack desera a pentagon review found that there wasn't a single point of failure in the leaks but said improvements were needed to the security clearance process and how classified information is safeguarded Shane Harris spoke to retired lieutenant general Scott Rice former director of The Air National Guard all the checks and balances of the system and the bureaucracy looked into check to ser background and he was vetted and approved for that type of clearance Jack we were told from friends was very obsessed with violent videos violent content I mean it's a picture of a really you know dark violence Brown racist you know gun lover basically should the military vetting process have caught all of these aspects of his personality yes and no uh the military vetting system is is pretty robust and it catches a lot of stuff he was a you know young high school kid took a test did very very well on it and so yes the the system vets and finds a lot of the but again it's it's not perfect and some things come through since the Cold War the security clearance protocol has involved extensive interviews with people who know applicants well in real life you can't really know chak toera unless unless you've also looked at the amount of time that he spent online because it was a huge part of his life so they have this blind spot to Jack tashera right they don't know all the things that he's saying and doing online to receive his security clearance terera would have had to fill out a detailed questionnaire the sf86 this is the current sf86 36 pages long this is literally mine from 2019 Mark Zade is a lawyer who has represented hundreds of people going through the security clearance process now this form has changed over time there's nothing in the Forum that asks for what are your usernames on dis different social media platforms what social media platforms are you on the government had no way to do a predictive analysis of the risk that it was adopting in granting him a security clearance so let me present some instances from his background when he was online and you tell me would these negatively affect his ability to get a clearance um making racist jokes it depends so every answer I'm always going to give on a clearance case is always it depends because that's that's a way but yes threatening even if in a what you might consider jokey way to kill a federal law enforcement officer yes absolutely of concern for a security clearance coming up with imagined scenarios for how you would kill a federal law enforcement officer absolutely a concerned you know if that very simple question what social media sites are you on had been asked on the Forum and one source from that social media site had been obtained he might never have gotten a security CLE he might never have gotten a security clearance by October 2021 Jack deser was working as an IT specialist with the 102nd intelligence Wing at the Otis Air National Guard base in Massachusetts to the extent that you understand it what is Jack tare's job for all practical purposes he's a technician he fixes and repairs systems May computer systems Hardware software file servers data storage all of those parts and pieces that sit behind in front of or next to an intelligent analyst that they use as their tools they're in there working on the system you can't help but see classified information correct absolutely and so you would think that a technician doesn't need access to top secret information but they're going to see see touch and feel top secret information all the time too was working in a skiff a secure facility where personal electronics are banned he would sometimes work unsupervised at night maintaining air conditioning units and answering phones I mean it must have been intoxicating for him he's working in this highly sensitive facility safeguarding the nation's secrets and then he goes home and hops onto Discord and it's a racist paranoid anti-semitic freefor all it's like he's living this double [Music] life around this time on picky's Discord server Taro was posting videos mimicking firstperson Shooters one video threatened violence against Jews and black people Jews scam rape and I'm magum I was there when it was posted I remember being posted and I was like what are you shooting is that out of the ordinary or was that something that that sort of rhetoric was common um all pretense aside right it was it was it was racist but if you were in the no it was funny and you were included and you're talking about your politics were they sort of conspiratorial you know Jews Jews rule the world this was huge in the pandemic the vaccines like all these companies there they've got Jewish CEOs we can't trust it and so is Jack Jack is one of the people talking about this definitely pucky says he now regrets the anti-Semitism hate speech and conspiracy theories at the end of 2021 with covid restrictions waning he says he began spending less time on on Discord control of the server was given over to [Music] tshir the server name eventually changed to Thug Shaker Central a racist and homophobic reference to gay pornography I would hate to describe in the server as like a cult of personality but it became very centered around Jack's humor in his point of view Jack toera was older than most of the group many of whom were young teenagers the more extreme he got and the smaller his Circle got he felt it was his duty to be this you know Father Figure to be this man that would tell them what's going on and was had all this information by this time Crow says they'd broken off their relationship and she had left the server a really key element was the way that the server became smaller and smaller over time and it wasn't n Only that there were fewer people in it but there were certain types of people who made the toxicity levels rise and Rise him being the owner he would have the final say in what happen so people began leaving getting banned Jack would ban them it it wasn't like silencing people because we thought their opinions were bad it was this guy isn't funny or he's a normie get him out of here oh sounds a little Cutthroat yeah yeah it was down to maybe like 20 guys when you have a group who share similar views it will be progressively become edgier darker brutal and it's easy to become locked in that Echo chamber Discord says that it shut down one of Jack desa's user accounts for hateful content but that he had two others and the reason it took no action against Thug Shaker Central was because nobody reported it in the case of Thug Shaker Central Jack deser was a moderator in the city analogy it's Jack's house is essentially that service yeah he built he built his house we found Thug Shaker Central violated several other terms of services hate speech images of Gore threats of violence these are all things that we've documented our reporting as well why were these particular kids allowed to continue sharing this kind of material for more than a year this comes down to our ability to identify what's happening in these spaces we rely on user reports we rely on third parties to help us with intelligence none of that happened here well none of it was likely to happen because they were all part of this community I mean if one of them objected to racist and anti-semitic comments being made routinely they might have flagged it but they didn't because they were all in on that is so is what you're saying is that the company has no way of monitoring for that kind of content on its own we require that people are helping to keep Discord safe we do scan um spaces in particular for child sex abuse material um that is unambiguously bad but when it comes to other classes of abuse we all need to collectively think about are we just diving into someone's privacy so in our city this is the difference between someone who has a listening device in your apartment versus not right and um it's it's certainly our choice to not put that listening device in in those private spaces in early 2022 the crisis between Ukraine and Russia is Jack desera started focusing his Discord posts on world events I'm not sure how to explain it it was just hey guys new channel at first the channel was for the war then Jack was like Hey I have this I have these numbers and we're like sure dude post it so then he started posting them as the war in Ukraine progressed pucky says toera started sharing classified information on Thug Sho Central it just sort of started with like casualty numbers and Equipment losses from both sides in the Ukraine Russia conflict it it was it was very basic just text like these are the real numbers guys from like wherever I can't remember if he said it was from the dod or anything like that I I'm pretty sure he did I likened it to him wanting us to be prepared for whatever the world is going to throw at us we spoke about the conspiracies and how we distrusted the government this was just another iteration of that we didn't trust the news and we were getting it from the source he was taking notes from the documents at work possibly using speech to text on his phone to transcribe them but he's now leaving work and coming back with whole swaths of intelligence from reports much of it verbatim and sharing them with friends online Discord chat transcripts released by federal investigators show that tesero was in fact already leaking classified information before Russia's invasion of Ukraine Jack gives someone who lives in a unnamed foreign city presumbly in Europe a heads up that there will be people coming he uses very vulgar language he says there'll be a wave of nword from a city in Ukraine soon an illusion to you know the the impending War uh and he says I'll elaborate more when I get home so this is significant for multiple reasons it's Jack appearing to give a preview of the inv of Ukraine based on classified material it's him talking to a foreign National about this the post reporters found that tashera's audience on Discord was wider than just Thug Shaker Central and he was regularly having exchanges like this on a much larger public server called abano's exclusion Zone Sam Oakford spent weeks mapping to share his posts and contacts on the abinavski server a community of military enthusiasts and gamers with more than 600 members around the world he found one of abanov moderators in Arizona Jack first really appeared around when the war started so February of 2022 he had joined the server before then but never really talked I found that out when I looked back through his messages it is a little odd that he just all of a sudden started talking right right around the start of the war yeah we're good Jeremiah agreed to be interviewed on the condition we use only his first name cool yeah so Jack started posting more over time yeah he started making like bi-weekly to weekly updates when the war was more active almost daily in some cases uh especially early on like May and June of uh 2022 so you were getting real window into what was going on in the world relating to the war oh absolutely it was very fascinating especially being so interested in things like that you're as a you know someone who likes history it's one of those things where it's like you're getting direct access to firsthand information which is extremely hard to get especially when you're living through something but uh being able to see it immediately was just very fascinating and a little bit exhilarating Jeremiah says Tara had an eager audience at abovsky and that he even took requests for classified information he had said that you know all if you live in this country you can kind of ask if I have anything on it I'll tell you so you'd have people from all over the place being like hey do you know anything that was going on about this event in my country and if he had anything he'd kind of tell them my thought the whole time was someone else will report him you know it'll it'll happen eventually there's no way and it just never did it just kept just kept posting and posting and posting did you consider reporting Jack at any point I did I I had times where I'm like I probably should report him you know I was 18 I was stupid and I was kind of just wanting to look at information yeah a lot of people told him you know hey you do realize it's illegal right he's like yeah I know I don't care I thought he was an absolute idiot and was definitely going to get arrested Air Force memos show that on more than one occasion he was caught in the act it says that Jack desera had been observed taking notes on classified intelligence information in the skiff he was observed putting a note in his pocket he was told to stop then a month later another warning but then they go on to offer him essentially a promotion to become an analyst uh and it says that he declined the training opportunity at this time and then 3 months later tashera was caught viewing classified content without authorization the Air Force declined to give an interview but this week published its own investigation which pointed to systemic failures in the handling of classified information and strongly criticized the culture of complacency at Otis Air National Guard base it found that several individuals knew about Tara's breaches of pro protocol but intentionally failed to report the full details and that a lack of oversight made it possible to print classified documents without detection the commander of the 102nd intelligence Wing at Otis was relieved of his command 14 others were disciplined for dereliction of Duties if you were a supervisor in that base or any base and you saw a young man who was an IT Tech looking at you know top secret information what would your reaction have been I would come down on somebody that's that's going down a pathway that is not within their job set I would come down on them very hard and say this is not appropriate and pull them off the [Music] line documents from federal investigators show that by January 2023 too was concerned that he may be discovered transcribing classified information at work he decided to switch his approach he removes documents from work takes them home and takes photographs of them with his phone and he uploads those and he uploads more than 300 documents like that we knew it was illegal when he was still just typing everything out but not pictures of documents which is you know fully incriminating February 28th 2023 that evening a teenager at home in Southern California logged into Discord and initiated the fall of Jack tashera he went by the name Luca he was naive immature kind of the whole nine yards of a kid Luca was one of the younger members of Thug Shaker Central he was someone who had a reputation for posting what you might say and he would post things in a reckless way so it set off everything that would happen over the next month Luka reposted images of dozens of the classified documents originally leaked to Thug Shaker they were sourced from nearly every us intelligence agency never before seen Ukrainian Battlefield assessments locations where the the CIA has recruited sources the technology the US uses to track Russian forces he probably just thought they were like a funny meme and posted them within days another user forwarded the posts to another server the leak was becoming a spill Jack desera wrote to his friends on abinavski he messaged on March 19th about how he's done posting and then thread disappears so he must have deleted it then in early April the classified documents were anonymously posted on forchan a site popular with far-right extremists soon afterwards they appeared on a pro-russian telegram Channel as these documents are now popping up like mushrooms all over the Internet Jack hears from one of his friends in abano's exclusion Zone that he thinks he's seen some of his thingies on on the internet meaning classified material so this is when it kind of hits the fan for Jack right on the evening of April 6th the news broke that the Pentagon and the FBI were trying to identify the source of the leaks top secret documents about the war in Ukraine have pentagon is investigating the leak of classified documents detailing us and NATO classified Pentagon documents are being discovered posted on social media toera took drastic action once this story was in the news Jack attempted to delete anything that he could control Jack controlled Thug Shaker Central he nuked it on April 7th uh the same day the FBI actually contacts Discord for the first time I get a phone call I immediately stand up a team of people we started to take action um while also collaborating with different law enforcement a gencies classified material had been leaking on Discord for more than a year but it had gone undetected until now no users at all reported anything about this to us how many servers were found to have classified documents moving through them as you described it I don't know the answer off the top of my head is it possible you all don't know how many servers these documents popped up in well look we're we're constantly trying to evolve how we can identify these things but without knowing what is and is not classified um and without having some way to essentially detect that um proactively we can't say definitively where classified documents go um and that's true of every single tech company this is not a Discord problem this is an internet problem we have no capability to identify when a classified document has potentially been leaked so the moment to Shara deleted Thug Shaker Central it was could not be recovered anything in it could not be recovered so that means that it's gone and you can't recover that at under any circumstances there is no way for us to recover information that's deleted by a user on Discord so in essence he was successful in a limited way in covering his tracks there by deleting the server I don't think he was successful given the fact that lots of screenshots have appeared desera could delete the thug Shaker server but he didn't have the same power or over abinavski he's running through various ways he can most efficiently clear up what he did on Aban aski he had asked me to go back and delete anything he might have posted outside the thread in February of 2022 he had also said you know don't tell anyone which I didn't but I immediately started taking screenshots of things and like just kind of collecting information in case it was ever needed so he's telling people delete anything that has anything to do with me if anyone comes talking to you don't tell them anything in the days that followed investigators say toera destroyed Electronics equipment adopted a new email address and got a new phone number you see him in these days understanding that the walls are closing and he knows people are looking for him and he's trying to delete the evidence that might lead to his door federal agents were getting close closer to chera and the Word was getting out among people who had known him online I knew a few days before it ever hit national news um I used to be very good friends with Mr Luca and I was still close friends with people kind of connected to him and I heard that they were looking into him for classified information yeah Luca was the first person who got visited by any law enforcement okay on April 10th 2023 the FBI interviewed Luca he told them that a clean-cut white male named Jack who lived in Massachusetts and worked for the US Air National Guard was the source of the leaks 3 Days Later federal agents moved in on Jack desera he was waiting for them on the back porch of his mother's house reading a Bible last thing he ever said to us he said um I'm sorry guys I really wish this would never happen I prayed and I prayed and I prayed that this day would never come but now it's just in God's hand I love you all and then that was basically it Jack toera was charged with six counts of retaining and trans transmitting classified National Defense information the indictment said that what he leaked could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign Nation nobody else has been charged in relation to the leaks tashera has pled not guilty and remains incarcerated pending his trial if convicted he could face decades in prison if you look at the whole narrative then of Jack there were so many points where he could have been flagged or interrogated further or even stopped and they just don't happen once you start tracking back you see failure failure failure failure failure there were countless Mis opportunities literally from the outset and as a result we have one of the worst leak cases in modern times to me it felt like a mix of his ego and ideology and just all of it Blended together cuz when you're on Discord that much you lose a lot of what normal socialization is I genuinely just think he never thought they'd come for [Music] him [Music] w for more on this and other Frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org [Music] Frontline front lines the Discord links is available on Amazon Prime video [Music] oh

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 375,137

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Id: AkgkBEuEHwU

Length: 53min 18sec (3198 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023