Samuel Oakford: I think listeners might remember the story from April, right? That's when it hit the news. The user identified later as Teixeira was tied to at first a handful, then dozens, then ultimately hundreds of classified intelligence documents that were circulating on Discord, right? So, in early April, they had cropped up on other platforms, what you might say to the open web, right? So, some of that was on the platforms like 4chan, Twitter, and that's when it hit the news. But reporters, including ourselves, worked backwards to create kind of the chain of events that led to that. And ultimately that led back to a Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. Now that name is kind of racist homophobic illusion in and of itself. It turned out that Teixeira also appeared to be leaking on another server called Abinavski's Exclusion Zone. And that's kind of where things stood in April, May. For the last, oh, six months, along with Frontline, the Post has tried to go deeper into those worlds and learn more about Teixeira's past to understand how this leaking came about, right? It's an extraordinary situation that's very different from previous leaks. It appears that it took place over, in fact, we know it took place for more than a year. And it was done with seeming impunity, right? On this platform called Discord. So, we spent a lot of time trying to understand how that could have happened. The role that Discord itself played in that and how Teixeira wasn't caught earlier.
Patrick Center: Jack Teixeira is a pretty young guy. He's an Air National Guardsman, or he was an Air National Guardsman. And he's involved in, from what I recall, part of the gaming culture. And this is his way of bragging a little bit or proving himself to his friends. Is that kind of the nugget of how this all begins?
Samuel Oakford: You know, it's really the key question in a lot of ways, right? Like, why did Teixeira leak? And then, you know, I'm sure it'll be instructive for the government itself, right, when they try to think about future threats to national security in this way. That's about the best answer as you're going to get, right? You might need a psychologist ultimately to tell you exactly why he did it, but he clearly got something from sharing these documents with people on the internet. Some of them he knew very intimately in this server, Thug Shaker Central, but then others he didn't know quite as well and he was sharing them on a much larger server with hundreds of users, although a smaller number were actually engaging with them. And he clearly would have wanted approval from those people. So, in as much as we know about his impulses, that appears to be the explanation, you have to show off to get something from having information that he could wield.
Patrick Center: So here we have this young person who somehow gains access to national security. So, we have that element and then also his way of sharing that information. So, two issues here.
Samuel Oakford: Yeah. That's absolutely right. And that's exactly what we were looking at in our collaboration with frontline. So, you know, I can take those one at a time. Discord itself is, is interesting because, you know, when we had the time to sit down with this really for, for many months, we wanted to understand why this happened on Discord, right? Was it a total coincidence? Could it have happened anywhere? Um, I think in some ways that's been the messaging from the company. They've also said that, you know, it's impossible to pick up classified material because how can you know what's classified right? Unless you're the government. And, you know, I think people can sympathize with that, but there's also elements of discord that are, that are really unique. And I think played a role here, for instance, their moderation model. It really relies on users, administrators, including Teixeira, right? To report activity on the platform. So, when you have a group of young teenagers who are very you know, influenced by someone like Teixeira, who's a little bit older, as was the case in that server, are they really going to be the ones to report his potential illegal activity, right? And then there's also some technical aspects of Discord that it's, it's closed. Um, and then the company doesn't really do its own moderation, except for some narrow categories of, of material, like a child sexual exploitation. Right. So, so this was a, a server and this was an environment where ultimately it wasn't that surprising to me. That if this were to happen, it happened there, right? And to take the second part of this, there were a lot of red flags in Teixeira’s history that appeared to have been overlooked. There is an incident that led to his suspension at his school in 2018, his high school. We've since learned more. We obtained a police report related to this incident, and it shed more light on the racist remarks that he made and the threats that some of his classmates perceived. So, this appears to have been considered by the government when issuing his security clearance. But in general, something that we learned more about was just how much of a gap there is for online activity in general in the clearance process. So, when you watch the documentary tonight, I think that's something to watch out for. Is the government able to see what people like Teixeira, who in their internet use are not very uncommon, right? This is what young people do. Is the government able to see that? And the answer really is no.
Patrick Center: I'm starting to introduce this question as we dive into these types of stories and monitoring the internet. And that is what role will A.I. (artificial intelligence) play in maybe weeding out some of these elements?
Samuel Oakford: Well, that's a good question. And A.I. can mean a lot of things, right? So, for the government, I don't really know what the answer to that would be. For tech platforms, I think that the future in a lot of ways is the deployment of machine learning, right? To do moderation or to pick up on potentially illegal activity. That's already happening. In fact, the current head of trust and safety at Discord itself, he had a machine learning company that was bought by Discord, right? So, Discord saw that it appears as the future of their trust and safety. And it definitely will continue to be deployed in that way, which, you know, is, is a pretty understandable use of A.I., right? It's to identify things at scale, right?
Patrick Center: What is it that you would like for viewers to take away from this film?
Samuel Oakford: Something I haven't mentioned in our interviews so far is the impact of the pandemic. And I think that that's the backdrop to a lot of this. I don't think, you know, I think everything that I've mentioned so far is really key to understanding what happened here. The platform itself, the clearance process, anything that might be overlooked in that. But also, the impact of the pandemic is important. And it really, ultimately this is a story about individuals and people who are doing things online and in real life and people that Teixeira met during the period of lockdowns, right? So that's something I would watch out for and made me think about what those years were like for me when we were locked down at home and this is a story that came out of that as well.
Patrick Center: Tonight at 10 o'clock on WGVU Public Television, PBS Frontline presents the Discord Leaks. Sam Oakford, The Washington Post, thank you so much.
Samuel Oakford: Thank you.