(Trends Wide) — New details revealed about the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman accused of leaking a trove of classified documents online show multiple alerts that went unheeded and were not enough to prevent the Pentagon from granting him a high-level security clearance. secret.
Officials across the government are now scrambling to find out why there were failures.
The US government has spent years and vast amounts of money to overhaul the way it investigates and monitors people with access to government secrets, but that didn’t stop the Pentagon from granting Jack Teixeira top-secret security clearance. , who prosecutors say had an arsenal of weapons at home and a history of violent rhetoric online.
Teixeira had to fill out a lengthy questionnaire known as E-QIPs (electronic questionnaires for investigation processing) and be vetted by the Defense Security and Counterintelligence Agency before being cleared, in 2021, officials told Trends Wide.
But according to court documents filed by prosecutors Wednesday, Teixeira was suspended from his high school just three years earlier, when a classmate “overheard him making comments about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, weapons at school and racial threats.”
“That clearly would have been a red flag,” a Pentagon official told Trends Wide.
In a 2020 application for a firearms identification card, Teixeira wrote that the investigators who examined him for a clearance were aware of the incident and that he had provided them with the “police reports, school letters, and any or all documents relevant messages sent to the investigator that were generated from this event”.
Teixeira also applied for a firearms identification card in 2018 and 2019, which were denied over concerns from the local Police Department about comments he had made at his school that led to his suspension, prosecutors said.
Information “boggles the mind”
That has left U.S. officials looking into what went wrong in the vetting process, wondering why those red flags were overlooked or not considered serious enough to prevent him from getting clearance, and whether his clearance was an exception. , or a broader and more systematic problem that needs to be reviewed.
The Senate Intelligence Committee twice in the past week has asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon for more information on Teixeira’s background investigation, an aide to the committee told Trends Wide. And the Air Force inspector general’s investigation is looking specifically at the Pentagon’s investigative process and whether any procedures were violated or ignored, Pentagon officials said.
Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters Thursday that when investigating someone for security clearance, the adjudicator looks at “a sufficient period” in someone’s life to determine whether they are eligible. . If misbehavior occurred during that period, several factors are considered, including the severity of the conduct, the age and maturity of the individual when it occurred, whether any coercion occurred, and the likelihood of recurrence.
Experts say the incident is an example of the Pentagon’s continued failure to prevent extremists from joining its ranks.
“Teixeira is a great example of how the Department of Defense has failed to figure out how to root out extremists,” said Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran and executive director of Task Force Butler, a nonprofit focused on combating extremism in the military. “The fact that he was able to obtain a top-secret security clearance after the local police learned he shouldn’t have a gun boggles the mind and makes me wonder what other kinds of problems there are with the clearance system.”
According to court documents, when Teixeira reapplied, in 2020, for a firearms identification card, he cited his position in the Army and his top-secret clearance as reasons why he should be entrusted with a firearm. Prosecutors say that when the FBI searched Teixeira’s room after arresting him earlier this month, they found “multiple weapons, including handguns, bolt-action rifles, shotguns” and an “AK-style high-capacity weapon.”
“Why didn’t they catch him earlier?”
Another question facing investigators is how they could have gotten hold of Teixeira’s online posts, which included hundreds of classified documents and alleged comments about the murder of people, sooner. Teixeira allegedly made the posts in a private chat room on the social media platform Discord, something the Pentagon cannot monitor without a review of privacy rules for members of the service.
The Defense Department only learned of the leak on April 6, four months after prosecutors say Teixeira began posting the documents on Discord. The New York Times has reported that Teixeira began leaking documents in a public Discord chat room in February 2022.
Teixeira allegedly also posted on Discord that he wanted to “kill a [improperio] a ton of people” because it would be “sacrificing [a] the weak-minded,” and allegedly asked another user for advice on how to carry out a shooting “in a crowded urban or suburban setting.”
“The leaker is being prosecuted, but what this has exposed is the need to reexamine our processes: why didn’t they catch him sooner?” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Trends Wide on Trends Wide. . “How many people need to have access to these documents?”
Warner added that the Senate Intelligence Committee, “in a bipartisan manner, is working on legislation to reform the classification process” because it believes that the US government overclassifies information, leading to too many people having access to it. to classified documents.
Detect “insider threats”
Over the past decade, there have been multiple efforts by the US Government to review the processes for granting security clearances and monitoring access to classified systems, following damaging breaches or acts of violence by security clearance holders.
After former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed the scope of the NSA’s intelligence-gathering apparatus in 2013, the Pentagon and spy agencies implemented new measures to detect “insider threats” that detect when an employee gains unauthorized access to a classified system.
That same year, in September 2013, a US Navy contractor, Aaron Alexis, shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. A Pentagon review of the incident found that Alexis’s employer, an information technology contractor, failed to inform the Navy of his mental health concerns, allowing Alexis to keep his clearance.
The government’s main program to catch someone like Teixeira is a multi-billion dollar effort that began in 2018. That program, largely run by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), aims to investigate Continuously check security clearance holders for warning signs periodically, every 5 to 10 years.
Carrie Wibben, a former DCSA deputy director, said background checks include high-level reviews of social media posts, but more invasive searches are prohibited due to privacy guarantees.
“There’s a line there that I don’t know if we can cross in the process,” Wibben told Trends Wide.
Still, lawmakers, as well as current and former US officials, told Trends Wide there is clearly a need to dig deeper into the background of people like Teixeira, who have access to the nation’s secrets. Background investigations are currently focused on counterintelligence threats and the likelihood that someone may have foreign loyalties, said former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell.
“Nowhere do we focus so much on general fitness, character [o] reliability,” Gerstell said. “We don’t really get into deep psychological profiles of anyone who, in this particular case, has chosen [a Teixeira]”.
Social networks are still new to the Government
A Pentagon official told Trends Wide that despite the department’s stated commitment to “continuous monitoring” of personnel, even after receiving their clearance, Defense officials are limited in what they can collect domestically on Americans. .
“Social media is a new world that the government hasn’t gotten a grip on yet,” said Brad Moss, an attorney who specializes in national security and security clearance law. “They usually don’t bother to read their accounts [si es que están abiertas al público] in the absence of a separate and independent reason for doing so.
Several Pentagon officials also said the Teixeira incident underscores the importance of insider threat efforts at the Defense Department, which rely on an individual’s colleagues and superiors to report suspicious behavior.
“I think until junior personnel understand how to interpret how their peers are acting, commanders will never know if a Teixeira is an extremist,” Goldsmith said. “He shows up in uniform, he’s going to have a clean uniform, he’s going to say hello, his commanders don’t know anything about Teixeira.”
Prosecutors said an airman who served with Teixeira told the FBI, as part of the leak investigation, that “Teixeira was very quiet, but he often talked about guns. He also said that he believed that he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if Teixeira were to shoot someone in the workplace.”
It is not clear if this colleague ever reported his concerns about Teixeira to his superiors; the investigation is still looking into whether any complaints were made about Teixeira during his time in the Air National Guard, a Pentagon official said.
Two leaders of Teixeira’s unit have been suspended as the investigation progresses, the Air Force said Wednesday: the commander of the 102 Intelligence Support Squadron and the commander of the detachment that oversees administrative support. The two officers also lost their access to classified systems and information.
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(Trends Wide) — New details revealed about the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman accused of leaking a trove of classified documents online show multiple alerts that went unheeded and were not enough to prevent the Pentagon from granting him a high-level security clearance. secret.
Officials across the government are now scrambling to find out why there were failures.
The US government has spent years and vast amounts of money to overhaul the way it investigates and monitors people with access to government secrets, but that didn’t stop the Pentagon from granting Jack Teixeira top-secret security clearance. , who prosecutors say had an arsenal of weapons at home and a history of violent rhetoric online.
Teixeira had to fill out a lengthy questionnaire known as E-QIPs (electronic questionnaires for investigation processing) and be vetted by the Defense Security and Counterintelligence Agency before being cleared, in 2021, officials told Trends Wide.
But according to court documents filed by prosecutors Wednesday, Teixeira was suspended from his high school just three years earlier, when a classmate “overheard him making comments about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, weapons at school and racial threats.”
“That clearly would have been a red flag,” a Pentagon official told Trends Wide.
In a 2020 application for a firearms identification card, Teixeira wrote that the investigators who examined him for a clearance were aware of the incident and that he had provided them with the “police reports, school letters, and any or all documents relevant messages sent to the investigator that were generated from this event”.
Teixeira also applied for a firearms identification card in 2018 and 2019, which were denied over concerns from the local Police Department about comments he had made at his school that led to his suspension, prosecutors said.
Information “boggles the mind”
That has left U.S. officials looking into what went wrong in the vetting process, wondering why those red flags were overlooked or not considered serious enough to prevent him from getting clearance, and whether his clearance was an exception. , or a broader and more systematic problem that needs to be reviewed.
The Senate Intelligence Committee twice in the past week has asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon for more information on Teixeira’s background investigation, an aide to the committee told Trends Wide. And the Air Force inspector general’s investigation is looking specifically at the Pentagon’s investigative process and whether any procedures were violated or ignored, Pentagon officials said.
Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters Thursday that when investigating someone for security clearance, the adjudicator looks at “a sufficient period” in someone’s life to determine whether they are eligible. . If misbehavior occurred during that period, several factors are considered, including the severity of the conduct, the age and maturity of the individual when it occurred, whether any coercion occurred, and the likelihood of recurrence.
Experts say the incident is an example of the Pentagon’s continued failure to prevent extremists from joining its ranks.
“Teixeira is a great example of how the Department of Defense has failed to figure out how to root out extremists,” said Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran and executive director of Task Force Butler, a nonprofit focused on combating extremism in the military. “The fact that he was able to obtain a top-secret security clearance after the local police learned he shouldn’t have a gun boggles the mind and makes me wonder what other kinds of problems there are with the clearance system.”
According to court documents, when Teixeira reapplied, in 2020, for a firearms identification card, he cited his position in the Army and his top-secret clearance as reasons why he should be entrusted with a firearm. Prosecutors say that when the FBI searched Teixeira’s room after arresting him earlier this month, they found “multiple weapons, including handguns, bolt-action rifles, shotguns” and an “AK-style high-capacity weapon.”
“Why didn’t they catch him earlier?”
Another question facing investigators is how they could have gotten hold of Teixeira’s online posts, which included hundreds of classified documents and alleged comments about the murder of people, sooner. Teixeira allegedly made the posts in a private chat room on the social media platform Discord, something the Pentagon cannot monitor without a review of privacy rules for members of the service.
The Defense Department only learned of the leak on April 6, four months after prosecutors say Teixeira began posting the documents on Discord. The New York Times has reported that Teixeira began leaking documents in a public Discord chat room in February 2022.
Teixeira allegedly also posted on Discord that he wanted to “kill a [improperio] a ton of people” because it would be “sacrificing [a] the weak-minded,” and allegedly asked another user for advice on how to carry out a shooting “in a crowded urban or suburban setting.”
“The leaker is being prosecuted, but what this has exposed is the need to reexamine our processes: why didn’t they catch him sooner?” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Trends Wide on Trends Wide. . “How many people need to have access to these documents?”
Warner added that the Senate Intelligence Committee, “in a bipartisan manner, is working on legislation to reform the classification process” because it believes that the US government overclassifies information, leading to too many people having access to it. to classified documents.
Detect “insider threats”
Over the past decade, there have been multiple efforts by the US Government to review the processes for granting security clearances and monitoring access to classified systems, following damaging breaches or acts of violence by security clearance holders.
After former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed the scope of the NSA’s intelligence-gathering apparatus in 2013, the Pentagon and spy agencies implemented new measures to detect “insider threats” that detect when an employee gains unauthorized access to a classified system.
That same year, in September 2013, a US Navy contractor, Aaron Alexis, shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. A Pentagon review of the incident found that Alexis’s employer, an information technology contractor, failed to inform the Navy of his mental health concerns, allowing Alexis to keep his clearance.
The government’s main program to catch someone like Teixeira is a multi-billion dollar effort that began in 2018. That program, largely run by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), aims to investigate Continuously check security clearance holders for warning signs periodically, every 5 to 10 years.
Carrie Wibben, a former DCSA deputy director, said background checks include high-level reviews of social media posts, but more invasive searches are prohibited due to privacy guarantees.
“There’s a line there that I don’t know if we can cross in the process,” Wibben told Trends Wide.
Still, lawmakers, as well as current and former US officials, told Trends Wide there is clearly a need to dig deeper into the background of people like Teixeira, who have access to the nation’s secrets. Background investigations are currently focused on counterintelligence threats and the likelihood that someone may have foreign loyalties, said former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell.
“Nowhere do we focus so much on general fitness, character [o] reliability,” Gerstell said. “We don’t really get into deep psychological profiles of anyone who, in this particular case, has chosen [a Teixeira]”.
Social networks are still new to the Government
A Pentagon official told Trends Wide that despite the department’s stated commitment to “continuous monitoring” of personnel, even after receiving their clearance, Defense officials are limited in what they can collect domestically on Americans. .
“Social media is a new world that the government hasn’t gotten a grip on yet,” said Brad Moss, an attorney who specializes in national security and security clearance law. “They usually don’t bother to read their accounts [si es que están abiertas al público] in the absence of a separate and independent reason for doing so.
Several Pentagon officials also said the Teixeira incident underscores the importance of insider threat efforts at the Defense Department, which rely on an individual’s colleagues and superiors to report suspicious behavior.
“I think until junior personnel understand how to interpret how their peers are acting, commanders will never know if a Teixeira is an extremist,” Goldsmith said. “He shows up in uniform, he’s going to have a clean uniform, he’s going to say hello, his commanders don’t know anything about Teixeira.”
Prosecutors said an airman who served with Teixeira told the FBI, as part of the leak investigation, that “Teixeira was very quiet, but he often talked about guns. He also said that he believed that he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if Teixeira were to shoot someone in the workplace.”
It is not clear if this colleague ever reported his concerns about Teixeira to his superiors; the investigation is still looking into whether any complaints were made about Teixeira during his time in the Air National Guard, a Pentagon official said.
Two leaders of Teixeira’s unit have been suspended as the investigation progresses, the Air Force said Wednesday: the commander of the 102 Intelligence Support Squadron and the commander of the detachment that oversees administrative support. The two officers also lost their access to classified systems and information.
