For years, the U.S. military has pushed to meet prospective Generation Z recruits on Discord, the online group-chat tool where many spend their time. It even runs a 17,000-member chatroom there for service members to talk about first-person shooter games, meet with career counselors and participate in what one sergeant in 2019 called the “Army of tomorrow.”
But Defense Department officials have also struggled to confront the risks of how Discord’s closed channels operate — and the ease with which they can be used to expose military intelligence. Last month, in a detailed guide aimed specifically at Discord users, Special Operations Command, which oversees the country’s most elite forces, told service members: “Don’t post anything in Discord that you wouldn’t want seen by the general public.”
By then, hundreds of classified documents had already spilled onto a Discord server frequented by a 21-year-old National Guard airman, Jack Teixeira, who had used the government secrets, interviews and an FBI charging document suggest, to impress the teenagers and 20-somethings who’d joined the chatroom.
That attempt to flex his military status for online approval ended with Teixeira’s arrest Thursday. On Friday, he was charged with two counts of retaining and sharing classified national defense information, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
But the arrest doesn’t end the dilemma for the military: how to supervise a young workforce that has access to classified secrets but lives much of its life online — including in corners of the internet where many share a fascination with military hardware and an eagerness to show off for strangers and friends. Two-thirds of U.S. military personnel are under the age of 30, with the vast majority of those under 25.
“Young men who may not feel their life gives them cachet and importance, they’re trying to find that online … often by attaching themselves to the gravitas of war and combat,” said James D. Ivory, a Virginia Tech professor who researches the social dimensions of online communities and video games.
Some of them, he said, seek to overcome feelings of isolation and gain clout with their peers by spending time in these small online communities where they may feel they can push the boundaries and build camaraderie — even though the groups offer only the illusion of privacy and control.
“We’re seeing massive security breaches and potential global instability just because someone was insecure about their popularity,” he added, “and wanted people to know they knew cool stuff about the military.”
Video games are one of the most popular forms of media for the 18-to-21-year-olds who are the target for the Defense Department’s recruiting efforts and make up much of its junior ranks. The military sponsors esports tournaments to drive interest and advertises on the popular game-streaming site Twitch.
Many gamers have flocked to Discord for its fast-moving mix of public and private chatrooms, known as servers, where members can exchange jokes, memes and voice clips in a place largely invisible to the open web. Founded in 2015 in San Francisco, Discord says its 19 million servers attract 150 million active users every month.
Teixeira’s group first met up on a Discord server devoted to Oxide, a YouTube creator known for his gaming clips and detailed breakdowns of combat rifles, body armor and military loadouts. The server, like many on Discord, was frenetic and irreverent: A clip from 2020 shows the room devolving into a chaos of gunfire noises and shouts of “Allahu akbar.”
A close-knit group from that server broke off into its own — named, for a pornographic meme, Thug Shaker Central — where they chatted about guns, games and geopolitics, and exchanged dark and racist jokes, members told The Washington Post.
Teixeira began sharing the documents late last year, FBI investigators said. By last month, a group member had reposted some of them in a separate Discord server, effectively sparking their viral spread.
In the offline world, Teixeira had worked in a relatively low-level IT-focused role as a “cyber transport systems specialist” in the Air National Guard, which gave him access to a computer network hosting top-secret information.
He worked at Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Mass., far from the grisly realities of combat. When federal agents arrested him Thursday at his family home in the woody suburb of Dighton, Mass., he was dressed in gym shorts and a green T-shirt.
In the Discord server, though, Teixeira had built a devoted followin
