Airman Jack Teixeira is, to put it mildly, no Edward Snowden. The suspected leaker of a trove of top-secret military documents recently arrested in Massachusetts appears to have had no motive, no plan — and, should he eventually stand trial under the US Espionage Act — no defence.
The 21-year-old national guardsman seems to have stumbled on a cache of highly sensitive material relating to the war in Ukraine via his role as a junior Air Force communications specialist. He evidently thought it would be fun to share it with a private internet chatroom called Thug Shaker Central, whose inmates otherwise passed the time posting racist memes and gun stuff.
In the movies the hunt for the leaker would take days and would end in a tense pursuit, preferably involving sophisticated spyware, a high-speed car chase and/or helicopters. Mundanely, Teixeira was picked up at his mum’s home wearing red shorts and a T-shirt, watched by reporters from the New York Times who beat the FBI to it.
It’s safe to predict that no film will be made about Teixeira. Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh and Oliver Stone will not be scrambling for the rights to his life, as they did over the Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg; environmental whistleblower Erin Brockovich; or Snowden himself. In all likelihood he will have many years of dull obscurity ahead of him — languishing in a maximum-security prison and trying to remember why he did it.
Airman Jack Teixeira, in short, is how not to be a...
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