The punishment that awaits Jack Teixeira, the young man accused of leaking the Pentagon’s classified documents

A long prison sentence and heavy fines.

This is where the military suspected of leaking confidential US documents will face should he be found guilty of participating in what the Pentagon has described as a “very serious” breach of national security. This was confirmed by experts consulted by the BBC.

The released documents contain classified information about the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as about China and US allies such as Israel, South Korea and Canada.

On April 13, the mystery surrounding the leaker’s identity seemed resolved with the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

According to US Attorney General Merrick Garland, Teixeira was arrested “without incident” as part of the “investigation into the alleged unauthorized extraction, retention and transmission of classified national defense information”.

Leaking the documents, which officials say are in a format similar to those from above, also prompted a review of how the Pentagon shares classified files and who can access them.

The group that has access to this material is relatively small.military officials said.

Here’s what is known about the investigation and its possible consequences.

How was the source of the leak found?

So far, US officials have been silent about the investigation and how Teixeira was identified as the person responsible for the leak.

The investigation, officials said, was conducted by the Justice Department in conjunction with the Pentagon, White House, State Department and other government agencies.

Steven Stransky, a lawyer who was formerly a senior adviser in the Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence Law Division, told the BBC officials will review the documents and their classification levels and they will try to find out “how the information was obtained or leaked from the information technology area of ​​the Department of Defense”.

“That includes traditional interviews and questioning as well as technical security checks that were conducted to determine whether or not classified emails were being sent to people who should not have access to them,” Stransky added.

What is known about Jack Teixeira?

The incarcerated cyber specialist led a private online group called Thug Shaker Central on the Discord social network, very popular among video game players. And in it he shared posts about video games, God, weapons, memes and also secret files.

Known as “OG” (for Original Guy, in English and what could be translated as the First Man), Teixeira graduated from high school in his hometown in 2020 North Dighton, Massachusetts, in the northeastern part of the country.

A year earlier, he enlisted in his state’s Air National Guard, a U.S. Air Force Reserve, and joined the 102nd Intelligence Wing.

Last July, Teixeira was promoted to the rank of Airman 1st Class, a relatively junior position, and was stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base in western Cape Cod, a beach town known worldwide for television series such as “Crime Reporter” (“A crime has beenwritten”, in Spain).

According to his service record, his job title was that of Cybernetic Transportation Systems officer.

The official Air Force website points out that personnel assigned to officers in positions such as the Teixeira are responsible operate the communication network of this branch of the military institution.

Teixeira’s file does not show that he was sent on a mission abroad, nor that he comes from a family with a military tradition.

The detainee’s stepfather retired after 34 years of servicesaid the newspaper The Washington Post. His last assignment was as a sergeant major in Teixeira’s unit, Intelligence Wing 102.

Her mother, for her part, worked at veteran-focused nonprofits and the Massachusetts Department of Veterans Services, according to LinkedIn and public records cited by US media.

Thug Shaker Central, the room on Discord that the detainee ran, included about 20 to 30 members, mostly young men, from different countries.

Members of that group interviewed by the American media described Teixeira as a gun enthusiast who was always trying to impress them.

“He was the man, the myth. He was the legend and everyone respected this man.”one of those members told the newspaper The New York Times.

Is the detainee accused of espionage?

Teixeira faces charges under the Espionage Act, a law enacted in 1917 that was the basis for previous convictions of spies and those who shared classified information with the press and the public.

Before the arrest, Stransky said that while the Espionage Act is “very old and outdated” it “effectively penalizes the collection, disclosure, or potential individual disclosure of national defense information.”

However, he specified that while the term “national defense information” is only loosely defined in law, in general terms it refers to any information that “could harm the United States … or put us at a disadvantage relative to from another country”.

The espionage law is rarely used and historically, it has mainly been applied against Americans spying for foreign governmentssuch as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 after being found guilty of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

However, it has also been applied to whistleblowers and insiders, including WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning and former CIA contractor Edward Snowden; and to Henry Kyle Frese, a Defense Intelligence Agency employee convicted of disclosing classified information to two reporters in 2018 and 2019.

When the Espionage Act was originally passed, it provided jail terms of up to 20 years and fines of up to $10,000 per charge.

Jail sentences and fines are still possible and could add up quickly if Teixeira is convicted of multiple legal offenses, whether or not he has intentionally harmed US interests.

“There are certainly criminal charges that can be filed and there are financial penalties as well,” Stransky said.

“If the Justice Department is pursuing a criminal violation of the Espionage Act, it will usually search imprisonment as a way of deterring such future actionshe added.

For example, Frese was sentenced to 30 months in prison, while Chelsea Manning was originally sentenced to 35 years, of which she served seven.

Earlier, in 1973, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg risked a 115-year prison sentence for theft and conspiracy charges stemming from the publication of a secret Pentagon study on the Vietnam War.

Who shares the documents being processed?

According to Stransky, the espionage law makes no distinction between the original information source, the platform it was leaked on, and whether or not those who shared it belong to the government.

In other words, legally speaking anyone who released the documents could be “equally liable for breaking the law”added the expert.

In practice, however, recipients outside the US government are unlikely to be sued, as the prosecution of third parties who received classified information raises constitutional concerns.

The Justice Department has rarely chosen to prosecute recipients, with the notable exception of Julian Assange and two staffers of the US-Israeli Public Affairs Commission, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, who received classified US documents in 2003.

How do you prevent new leaks?

In 2011, under the Barack Obama administration, it was announced the creation of a working group against insider threats, charged with protecting classified information.

As part of the initiative, federal entities were required to create programs to ensure that data breaches, such as the WikiLeaks and Snowden revelations, would not happen again.

This included the strict control of employees, computers and secret networks.

In the wake of this leak, Stransky said the government will take a thorough look at those programs to see what improvements can be made.

“They’ll look at what kind of oversight has been done with the Task Force and how they’ve followed up on their mandate to enforce these kinds of restrictions,” he said.

“Whether those activities are performed or not is something that is probably classified, and it will be interesting to see if there is any congressional oversight now about how the Task Force has carried out its mandate over the past decade,” the expert added.

Following Teixeira’s arrest, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner released a statement promising to “investigate why this happened, why it went undetected for weeks, and how to prevent future leaks.”