Amanpour and Company

>> We turn to Boston, where a low ranking National Guard's men has been charged over the most significantly of U.S. military secrets in a decade.

The documents that Jack allegedly posted on social media expose the depth of U.S. spying and revealed details of Ukraine's military plans.

The Pentagon is in a damage control, calling it a deliberate criminal act.

One of the reporters, Shane joins Walter to explain how he tracked down the suspect.

Walter: Thank you.

Congratulations on the scoop.

So, you were able to track down this guy, Jack, the National Guard guy, who leaked all these secrets, was arrested this week.

You tracked him down on a discord server.

Discord is kind of a clubhouse where people can create their own conversation groups online.

Tell me about that.

How did you find out about that?

Shane: on this particular discord server, the two dozen members who were active, the common interest was actually guns and military hardware.

They met in a room on discord which is popular with tumors, they were very into guns and YouTube videos about people shooting guns.

They formed their own group where they were united by that common interest.

Invitation only.

This guy, Jack, was essentially the club director.

He had administrative privileges on the server, he decided who got invited.

He kinda became the elder figure even though he is quite young himself a lot of teenage boys and younger men.

He was sort of the group leader.

Walter: How did you know about him?

How you guys got this scoop, explain how you got there.

Shane: You are able to find, through social media, individuals who claimed to have some knowledge about the matter and seemed to be connected to it in some way.

We started reaching out to people.

One of the people is the individual that you see profiled in our story, one of these members.

We were able to go meet with him to verify his identity and then through a series of long interviews, essentially get the story that we tell in the paper of what it was like inside his server where one day, this guy Jack just started posting classified documents.

Walter: It seemed like it was kind of a crowdsourcing, how do we figure out who the real guy is?

Shane: It was very interesting.

If you.

the story, they identify him basically through a data trail.

There is not individuals who reveal him, and they wouldn't reveal him to us.

His friends really protected him.

It was more the footprints that he left on various servers and social media.

Ultimately, it is kind of this very Online guy is revealed through that very Online residence and ultimately, revealed him to the wider world and potentially to authorities, too they had the ability to subpoena information which we cannot do as journalists.

Walter: Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes novel.

What other clues were in there?

Shane: If you look at the classification markings on some of the documents, it told you about the level of clearance this person was likely to have.

What might be surprising is that the clearance level spoke to someone who had fairly standard security parents.

None of this information was so highly compartmented that only a handful of people were able to get it, we understood that thousands of thousands of people would have access to this.

Some of it looked like briefing materials that were presented form much more senior officials.

Some of these Ukraine warm-ups, we believed that where presented to Mark Milley.

That told us, are we looking at someone who is in a support role?

Someone whose job is to put booklets together?

That was helpful in trying to ascertain, is this person someone who is inside the Pentagon, or somebody who is working more removed from the Pentagon in a support role?

That is ultimately what Jack proved to be.

Walter: He is one of thousands who are doing things, he has access to what you call the joint worldwide intelligence communications system but he is a 21-year-old gamer.

How in the world did he get access?

Shane: The short answer is, this is how the intelligence community changed after 9/11.

Before 9/11, the intelligence agencies capped a lot of their information silos and to themselves.

NSA kept it in that box.

There wasn't a lot of sharing and mingling.

The 9/11 attacks made the argument that, you need to have more collaboration if the intelligence community will be aware of all the threats.

The structures and procedures for changing to allow much more lower-level people access to more information.

This explains WikiLeaks with Chelsea Manning and Bradley Manning.

Someone like reality winter was able to get access to classified information.

All of these people who have leaked information in the past from their low-level jobs, why hasn't the intelligence community figured out, if you are going to have information spread out all over the place, are you going too far?

Why is it that these young people still have access to all of this information that they could potentially expose?

I think those will be big policy questions coming out of this.

After the last go around, we heard officials saying, we will clampdown and make it so this can't happen anymore, but it keeps happening.

The intelligence community has adapted to this more collaborative environment, but it comes at significant cost and this leak is one of them.

Walter: President Biden said he was more concerned about the fact of the leak then he was about the suspect.

He said, I am concerned that it happened that there is nothing contemporaneous that I am aware of that is of great consequence.

Is that true?

Shane: It is interesting, considering I think this document dump really reveals a lot about the penetrations that the U.S. has into foreign adversaries.

I think the information was very revealing.

A lot of it is something we have gotten from journalistic sources.

To me, what is remarkable is that it shows all the ways the U.S. is gathering this information.

You can pretty clearly infer that the U.S. intelligence community has deeply penetrated the Russian ministerial -- Ministry of Defense.

That kind of revelation about sources and methods is traditionally what intelligence communities and agencies try to prevent.

But as the president's view, but talking to people in his administration, they seem a lot more alarmed and are very nervous about the fact that there are more documents out there that reporters are continuing to look at.

Walter: Compare this to Edward Snowden.

Is this worse?

Shane: I think it is different.

I think it is more significant.

I have written a lot surveillance.

These Snowden leaks went very deep on a big and important suspect.

Cyber surveillance, signals intelligence, NSA monitoring.

The aperture of that lens was focused and narrow on NSA.

A lot of the documents revealed were PowerPoint presentations, it appeared that some cases people might be exaggerating some of the capabilities in order to impress their bosses.

These leaks are just covering the world.

It is almost as if you were just given access to the top-secret daily newspaper, which is not really a thing.

What intelligence officials are telling policymakers about everything that is going on.

You get a window in to what people like the president and secretary of defense and secretary of state are hearing every day, and you get a demonstration of the full range of capabilities of U.S. intelligence.

Imagery, information from human sources.

This is really kind of like the buffet of U.S. espionage.

It is far more revealing in its detail and breadth and the Snowden files, which went very in detail on one particular intelligence matter.

Walter: We didn't hear a whole lot of squeals from our allies.

Is that because some of this was shared with them as well?

Shane: It could be.

I think there is also a basic understanding that countries spy on each other.

U.S. tries to monitor Israel, we look at many of our allies, but we are keeping tabs on them.

.

I think they know there is an implicit bargain there, to understand that we may be gathering information, too.

Walter: One of the members you talked to said that this group was not a fascist recruiting.

Why would they say that?

Was it?

Shane: They say that because the name of the server, they call it the Shaker Central.

That is a racist allusion.

It is a reference that they lot of racial underpinnings and overtones.

Thug Shaker is a reference to a meme that has gone around that white people share when they are ridiculing black people.

It has taken on currency with the alt rate -- alt right.

A lot of these kids, many of them were kids, were sharing racist and anti-Semitic names and jokes.

It is hard for me to know, is that because they felt that way or because, as offensive and alien as that might seem to you and me, they just thought it was funny or made them seem sophisticated?

The overtones was very alt rate, it leaned conservative but not in a political way, they were all religious, Orthodox Christian which is interesting.

I think that when we spoke to them, the one teenager we talked to, they were really aware of the fact of how the outside world would look at this.

So you are all sharing racist jokes, you like guns, this -- you are led by this older person, this has aspects of almost recruitment.

They were just trying to dispel the notion that it was literally motivated.

They didn't talk about politics a lot.

I think this is an element of them being sensitive now, what they look like and how the world is going to interpret that.

If you are sharing racist and anti-Semitic jokes all the time, be it is because you harbor racist and anti-Semitic use.

-- views.

That doesn't have much to do with the motivation.

Walter: What do you think the motivation was?

Shane: I have been covering intelligence for 20 years, and I have never seen a motivation like this.

It was to impress these teenagers.

Because of his job, he had access to a ton of classified information.

He had access to things that mortals and citizens didn't know.

He did gain some sense of power.

People who run this information when he started sharing it said, he was doing it to keep us informed about world events.

There was almost a teacher and student aspect to this relationship.

He appeared to have a fairly conspiratorial view about the government and the world and thought he was waking his followers up or bringing them into the inner circle.

I asked, how did you feel when you saw this highly classified information that ordinary people don't get to see?

His words were, I felt like I was on top of Mount Everest, above other people because I knew things they didn't.

It is kind of this culture of exclusivity and superiority that seems to have created an environment in which he was showing his own and flexing in front of these younger people.

I have never seen a leak motivated by that.

They do it either for money or because they want to expose what they think is wrong.

I have never seen people expose government secrets to impress teenagers.

Walter: You said there was a video.

Of him shooting guns and shouting racist and anti-Semitic comments.

Describe that video and tell us what he was shouting.

Shane: In the video, he is at a shooting range and wearing safety goggles and big earmuffs, he is holding a large rifle.

Someone appears to be filming him on a camera.

He shouts the N-word and another slur about Jewish people.

The context is, as if he is saying, this is what you are going to get my then he starts firing the rifle.

Saying these slurs and using the N-word and shooting the gun as a way of seeming threatening.

When these people showed us the video, I don't think they understood it to be serious.

I think they thought he was being funny.

Most people would find it very alarming and quite threatening and say, is this someone promoting violence or indicating that he might?

It was a pretty chilling video to see and gave us a bit of pause about, are we not just dealing with a leaker, but is this potentially a violent person?

When the FBI arrested him, they were in full tactical gear.

They were in body armor which tells you they were holding out the possibility he might be heavily armed and perhaps wouldn't go easily.

Walter: He think that corners of the Internet, private servers on various social sites, as well as COVID and other things have stirred up or incubated a conspiratorial type thing that we are seeing?

Shane: I do.

I think this story is something that may be could only happen during the pandemic.

This server group, it formed during the pandemic and became a refuge where a lot of these teenage boys who were cut off from each other, they couldn't get together with their friends, and they spent all of their waking hours in this room.

I think it was isolating and potentially work to their sense of reality.

They are living in a world in which things are very online.

My impression was that they didn't really understand the real-world implications of this information.

I got the feeling that this was kind of a story that was very, of the moment.

These impressionable kids isolated by the pandemic were around this older person who was persuading them of certain things and holding them in thrall to him.

He was a spooky kind of atmosphere that spoke to the control it seemed like he had.

Walter: Thank you so much, Shane.