The Younger Players Who Shook the Intelligence World

“We’re gunners, we’re gear nerds,” Vahki mentioned, including that group members have spent tons of of {dollars} on gear each within the digital world and in actual life.

However Airman Teixeira additionally started posting a special kind of content material.

It began as lengthy each day memos with sophisticated and, at occasions, complicated summaries of worldwide occasions that members of the group discovered troublesome to observe. Typically he would admonish his youthful buddies for not taking the knowledge severely, Vahki mentioned.

Round October final yr, his frustration led him to start out posting authentic paperwork, together with detailed battle maps from the conflict in Ukraine marked “TOP SECRET.” From October to March, Vahki mentioned, the airman posted about 350 paperwork to the group.

The paperwork might need remained confined to Thug Shaker Central had been it not for a member of the group named Lucca, a 17-year-old from California, who may not have absolutely grasped the gravity of the paperwork he had been given entry to.

On March 2, Lucca was concerned in a dialog concerning the Ukraine conflict in a public Discord groupcalled #Conflict-Posting when he revealed a number of dozen paperwork from the cache that had been uploaded to Thug Shaker Central.