Gen Z Spies: Are Gamers a Bigger Threat Than Foreign Operatives?

It is difficult to know whether to be worried about the espionage risks from online gaming or if warnings are as over-hyped as Duke Nukem Forever. We decided to find out.

US Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira found friends online like many Gen Z gamers during Covid-19. He had a girlfriend known as ‘Crow’, a young woman he’d never met in person. Teixeira also traded memes and war videos with virtual friends on the Discord platform, and - if prosecutors are right - leaked hundreds of US secrets to impress an unlikely group of military strategists: chronically online teens living at home with mom.

The Massachusetts airman is not the first gamer accused of spilling secrets online - not for money or ideology, but to settle disputes, score bragging rights, and ‘own’ an opponent. Texieira pleaded guilty on six counts involving wilful retention and transmission of national defense information in March 2024 but he's not the only gamer suspected of leaking classified information. Since 2021, military intel has been posted three times on the War Thunder gamers’ forum - technical specs of British and French tanks and intel about Chinese DTC10-125 tank ammo, all apparently genuine.
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The Discord leaks may be in a class of their own, however. PBS and The Washington Post describe them as one of the biggest government leaks in US history: more than 300 pages of highly classified intel, from Pentagon assessments of the Russia-Ukraine war to Iran’s nuclear program. A Foreign Policy headline claims gamers have even ‘eclipsed spies’ in the realm of espionage.

But with only four reported leaks and billions of gamers, can the situation really be so dire?

“While I do not consider gamers to be ‘eclipsing’ spies, there is some merit to addressing/considering this issue,” said former CIA officer Peter Warmka, a cybersecurity expert and author of Confessions of a CIA Spy. Warmka is not alone in that thought.

Jonathan Askonas, an academic and co-author of the Foreign Policy article on gaming, said his central argument is that the traditional acronym intelligence officers use to recruit spies, MICE (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego), needs a fifth addition to describe the durable, deep social ties experienced by people heavily involved in an online community. “It's not really about ‘video games’ as such but about the way the Internet is rewiring human sociality in ways that current counterespionage practices do not know how to cope with.”

So how did we arrive here? It is a tale rooted in the Cold War that features NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and an intriguing set of cyber spies who play online games for a living.

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