Jack Teixeira, the man arrested Thursday by the FBI on charges of posting dozens of confidential US Department of Defense documents online, has been officially indicted on charges of unauthorized possession and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal of confidential information. The documents released by Teixeira mainly contained information and analysis on the war in Ukraine and were shared in an online group on Discord, a very popular messaging platform. According to the allegations, Teixeira had begun posting information contained in the documents on the group in December 2022, and since January he had also begun sharing photos of the same documents.
Teixeira is 21 years old and works for the intelligence division of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, the Air Force reservist corps in the state. The documents with the allegations clarified how he would have accessed the confidential documents he released: based on his role in the Air National Guard, Teixeira would have obtained in 2021 what is called a “security clearance” to be able to access confidential documents of the type “top secret”, a category that many of the documents published online fell into. Such an authorization requires a binding life oath not to disclose information contained in the documents, which if violated leads to a criminal indictment. In addition to this authorization, for his work Teixeira would also have had access to other highly confidential programs, again starting from 2021.
In the American system, confidential documents – those that are often also called “classified” (from the English adjective classified) – are those that contain information that could harm or endanger the national security of the United States. There is a precise classification of confidential documents, within which the “top secret” documents are considered the most delicate: for this reason they are also the ones to which fewer people generally have access.
– Read also: What are these “classified” documents
