WASHINGTON—Videogame enthusiasts are scouring popular social-media platforms in the hope of finding classified U.S. military documents, turning the recent national-security crisis over leaked secrets into a global scavenger hunt.
The competition pits online users eager to see secrets against the U.S. government, which wants to keep those secrets off the internet.
At issue are a cache of sensitive military documents that the Justice Department alleges Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, posted on Discord, a platform that allows gamers to gather and communicate online. The documents first began showing up last year on a Discord group—known as a server—and remained unnoticed for months until some of them were reposted to other larger servers and platforms, eventually finding their way to the media, garnering public and U.S. government attention.