(Trends Wide) — Careless presidents saving documents for posterity. A Secretary of State receiving government data forwarded to her private email server. Ideologically motivated leakers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner.
Now, the scandal centers on a 21-year-old in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, a specialist in cyber transportation systems, who apparently bragged online to his teenage gambling peers.
If the many previous and ongoing scandals involving classified US information aren’t a wake-up call that the government has a problem, perhaps the arrest of Jack Teixeira will do the trick.
Wearing a T-shirt, shorts, dark socks and boots, Teixeira turned himself in to a heavily armed FBI SWAT team outside his mother’s house Thursday as news helicopters hovered overhead.
He is suspected of leaking classified data that has shaken the US Intelligence Community, strained relations with foreign governments and jeopardized valuable information that has given Americans insight into Russia’s moves in Ukraine.
But the profile of the alleged leaker who is emerging, and which could certainly change a bit as we learn more, is not that of a foreign spy or ideologically motivated whistleblower, but rather the leader of a gaming chat group who wanted to impress. to the teens she met online during the pandemic.
Those details are from an incredible report in The Washington Post, which published an anonymous interview with a member of the closed group of about two dozen people on the Discord platform where images of the classified material first surfaced.
Some Serious Leak Questions That Need Answers
- Why did Teixeira have access to some of the country’s most sensitive secrets that were apparently prepared for the highest uniformed commanders in the Department of Defense?
- How could photographs of classified data be posted in a chat group frequented by teenage gamers?
- What justified the high-level security clearance for a young airman who, according to the young member The Washington Post spoke to, complained about “government overreach” and appeared on videos using racial epithets before firing a large gun? ?
- What motivated you?
Some answers begin to emerge
First, what did Teixeira do as a specialist in cybernetic transportation systems?
That title “is the Air Force recruiter’s way of describing an Information Technology specialist role,” Christopher Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during an appearance Thursday on “The Lead ”, from Trends Wide, with Jake Tapper. “So these are the people who design, implement the computer system networks and then maintain them.”
That can include IT systems in both unclassified and classified space, Krebs said, noting that classified material is typically seen in an area known as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” or SCIF, on a military installation.
How could Teixeira have obtained images of these classified materials? Guessing, Krebs said Teixeira may have found some of the classified material that had been discarded, possibly in a burn bag, from an earlier briefing.
Those details will have to be known.
The US has had many classified material scandals
One thing that should become abundantly clear from the series of leaks and mishandled pieces of classified information beyond this story is that the system has problems.
Special prosecutors are actively investigating both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for possible mishandling of classified materials found in their homes. In Biden’s case, those documents were from his time as vice president, while the documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort were found after he left the White House.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that witnesses questioned as part of Trump’s investigation were asked if he was showing a map containing sensitive intelligence information.
Evolving vulnerabilities
Among the investigations are those of the email server that persecuted the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2016, and the leaks of the former subcontractor of the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, who leaked documents about a surveillance program. massive US Government; former US Army soldier now known as Chelsea Manning, who leaked information about US military conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the NSA Reality Winner extractor, who leaked a report on Russian meddling in the US election.
“They continue to crash systems over time after learning of each new vulnerability,” Trends Wide correspondent Josh Campbell, who covers homeland security and law enforcement, said Thursday.
Campbell, a former FBI supervisory special agent, also noted that the military has come under some scrutiny because, while it employs the largest number of people with security clearances, it doesn’t subject them to the same rigorous reauthorization from other agencies that routinely they require people to go “in the box,” Campbell said, and take a polygraph test.
“I’m not worried about the leak”
Leaks of Pentagon documents should not cause alarm, President Joe Biden said during an appearance in Ireland on Thursday.
“I’m not worried about the leak,” Biden said. “I’m concerned that it happened, but there’s nothing contemporary that I know of that has any consequence.”
Already, after these most recent leaks, there have been changes at the Pentagon. Trends Wide reported Thursday that some US officials who used to receive the briefing materials daily stopped receiving them in recent days.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut said these repeated problems will hurt America’s allies.
“I would forgive the South Koreans or the Israelis or the French or whoever for saying we may not be able to share our most sensitive information with the Americans because they can’t seem to keep it out of the hands of 21-year-olds or garages.” ex-presidents or people called Reality Winners or whatever,” he told Tapper.
More than a million people have top secret clearance
As Trends Wide’s What Matters first reported last August when the FBI found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, there is actually a very large universe of people with access to top-secret data.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence publishes what is described as an annual report, “Security Clearance Determinations,” although the most recent I could find is from fiscal year 2017.
In it, more than 2.8 million people are described as having security clearance, as of October 2017: more than 1.6 million with access to confidential or secret information and almost 1.2 million with access to top secret information.
There are additional people who have security clearance, but do not currently have access to the information. This includes civilian employees, contractors, and members of the Armed Forces.
A set of keys for classified information
Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder compared the method by which classified information is stored to a locked house where authorized persons can obtain a key. Abusing that authorization, Ryder said, is a “deliberate criminal act.”
David Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer, continued the analogy of keys as he tried to explain the need for accountability here.
“The idea is to give people the keys to the rooms in the house where they need to access that information,” Priess said on Trends Wide on Thursday. “There will be legitimate questions about how many keys this individual had. How many rooms were you allowed to go into to remove things as part of his job? And he really needed that as part of his job?
Campbell said it’s important not to assume Teixeira’s young age should be a factor.
“I can tell you firsthand that there are young people in the Military doing incredible intelligence work all over the world,” Campbell said.
Overclassification is also a problem
But it is already recognized at the highest levels of government that the system needs to change. The Biden administration has considered updating the regulations to reduce the amount of classified information.
CIA director Bill Burns said Tuesday while speaking at an event at Rice University in Texas that he believes there is a “serious overclassification problem” in the US government and that it is also necessary to learn lessons from this latest leak.
“Are there things we should do better? Of course,” Burns said. “I think sometimes there is a serious problem of overclassification in the US government, which I think needs to be addressed.”
Related Post
(Trends Wide) — Careless presidents saving documents for posterity. A Secretary of State receiving government data forwarded to her private email server. Ideologically motivated leakers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner.
Now, the scandal centers on a 21-year-old in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, a specialist in cyber transportation systems, who apparently bragged online to his teenage gambling peers.
If the many previous and ongoing scandals involving classified US information aren’t a wake-up call that the government has a problem, perhaps the arrest of Jack Teixeira will do the trick.
Wearing a T-shirt, shorts, dark socks and boots, Teixeira turned himself in to a heavily armed FBI SWAT team outside his mother’s house Thursday as news helicopters hovered overhead.
He is suspected of leaking classified data that has shaken the US Intelligence Community, strained relations with foreign governments and jeopardized valuable information that has given Americans insight into Russia’s moves in Ukraine.
But the profile of the alleged leaker who is emerging, and which could certainly change a bit as we learn more, is not that of a foreign spy or ideologically motivated whistleblower, but rather the leader of a gaming chat group who wanted to impress. to the teens she met online during the pandemic.
Those details are from an incredible report in The Washington Post, which published an anonymous interview with a member of the closed group of about two dozen people on the Discord platform where images of the classified material first surfaced.
Some Serious Leak Questions That Need Answers
- Why did Teixeira have access to some of the country’s most sensitive secrets that were apparently prepared for the highest uniformed commanders in the Department of Defense?
- How could photographs of classified data be posted in a chat group frequented by teenage gamers?
- What justified the high-level security clearance for a young airman who, according to the young member The Washington Post spoke to, complained about “government overreach” and appeared on videos using racial epithets before firing a large gun? ?
- What motivated you?
Some answers begin to emerge
First, what did Teixeira do as a specialist in cybernetic transportation systems?
That title “is the Air Force recruiter’s way of describing an Information Technology specialist role,” Christopher Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during an appearance Thursday on “The Lead ”, from Trends Wide, with Jake Tapper. “So these are the people who design, implement the computer system networks and then maintain them.”
That can include IT systems in both unclassified and classified space, Krebs said, noting that classified material is typically seen in an area known as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” or SCIF, on a military installation.
How could Teixeira have obtained images of these classified materials? Guessing, Krebs said Teixeira may have found some of the classified material that had been discarded, possibly in a burn bag, from an earlier briefing.
Those details will have to be known.
The US has had many classified material scandals
One thing that should become abundantly clear from the series of leaks and mishandled pieces of classified information beyond this story is that the system has problems.
Special prosecutors are actively investigating both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for possible mishandling of classified materials found in their homes. In Biden’s case, those documents were from his time as vice president, while the documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort were found after he left the White House.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that witnesses questioned as part of Trump’s investigation were asked if he was showing a map containing sensitive intelligence information.
Evolving vulnerabilities
Among the investigations are those of the email server that persecuted the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2016, and the leaks of the former subcontractor of the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, who leaked documents about a surveillance program. massive US Government; former US Army soldier now known as Chelsea Manning, who leaked information about US military conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the NSA Reality Winner extractor, who leaked a report on Russian meddling in the US election.
“They continue to crash systems over time after learning of each new vulnerability,” Trends Wide correspondent Josh Campbell, who covers homeland security and law enforcement, said Thursday.
Campbell, a former FBI supervisory special agent, also noted that the military has come under some scrutiny because, while it employs the largest number of people with security clearances, it doesn’t subject them to the same rigorous reauthorization from other agencies that routinely they require people to go “in the box,” Campbell said, and take a polygraph test.
“I’m not worried about the leak”
Leaks of Pentagon documents should not cause alarm, President Joe Biden said during an appearance in Ireland on Thursday.
“I’m not worried about the leak,” Biden said. “I’m concerned that it happened, but there’s nothing contemporary that I know of that has any consequence.”
Already, after these most recent leaks, there have been changes at the Pentagon. Trends Wide reported Thursday that some US officials who used to receive the briefing materials daily stopped receiving them in recent days.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut said these repeated problems will hurt America’s allies.
“I would forgive the South Koreans or the Israelis or the French or whoever for saying we may not be able to share our most sensitive information with the Americans because they can’t seem to keep it out of the hands of 21-year-olds or garages.” ex-presidents or people called Reality Winners or whatever,” he told Tapper.
More than a million people have top secret clearance
As Trends Wide’s What Matters first reported last August when the FBI found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, there is actually a very large universe of people with access to top-secret data.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence publishes what is described as an annual report, “Security Clearance Determinations,” although the most recent I could find is from fiscal year 2017.
In it, more than 2.8 million people are described as having security clearance, as of October 2017: more than 1.6 million with access to confidential or secret information and almost 1.2 million with access to top secret information.
There are additional people who have security clearance, but do not currently have access to the information. This includes civilian employees, contractors, and members of the Armed Forces.
A set of keys for classified information
Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder compared the method by which classified information is stored to a locked house where authorized persons can obtain a key. Abusing that authorization, Ryder said, is a “deliberate criminal act.”
David Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer, continued the analogy of keys as he tried to explain the need for accountability here.
“The idea is to give people the keys to the rooms in the house where they need to access that information,” Priess said on Trends Wide on Thursday. “There will be legitimate questions about how many keys this individual had. How many rooms were you allowed to go into to remove things as part of his job? And he really needed that as part of his job?
Campbell said it’s important not to assume Teixeira’s young age should be a factor.
“I can tell you firsthand that there are young people in the Military doing incredible intelligence work all over the world,” Campbell said.
Overclassification is also a problem
But it is already recognized at the highest levels of government that the system needs to change. The Biden administration has considered updating the regulations to reduce the amount of classified information.
CIA director Bill Burns said Tuesday while speaking at an event at Rice University in Texas that he believes there is a “serious overclassification problem” in the US government and that it is also necessary to learn lessons from this latest leak.
“Are there things we should do better? Of course,” Burns said. “I think sometimes there is a serious problem of overclassification in the US government, which I think needs to be addressed.”
