Would a guy in his position even have access to these documents? I'm thinking that there has to be someone who shared them or at least shared a way to gain access to them. I'm sure the FBI will be following the trail of bread crumbs to the original source. Now if it turns out he is the original source, we're in huge trouble. Because a 21 year old kid working night shift in some remote Cape Cod office for the Massachusetts Air National Guard shouldn't have this type of access.
The dirty not-so-secret about national defense apparatus in this country is that there are thousands of people in these various sub-sub-wings of our military along side mediocre contractors cashing in on defense contracts who go through rudimentary security clearance checks and have access to all this information.
I grew up outside DC and every so often you hear of the security clearance spooks interviewing you or someone you know about some jamoke you went to high school with to determine if they're a security risk. They also ask those people really difficult questions, like, "Would you use drugs at work?" "If you did, would you download illegal documents?" "If you did get high at work and download illegal documents, would you post them on Myspace?" About half of the people actually fail to answer those questions in the expected way. The other half make 200,000 dollars a year from a subcontractor of a subcontractor of Northrop Grumman pushing paper at a desk all year.
> The other half make 200,000 dollars a year from a subcontractor of a subcontractor of Northrop Grumman pushing paper at a desk all year.
That's what happens when you don't want the government to spend money actually hiring skilled employees. Instead we waste money trying to not waste money. The government could pay a very skilled developer $150k/year + benefits. But certain people think that the government only wastes money. So we can't have public sector employees making comparable wages. Instead we pay a "contractor"[1] $200k/year where the contractor gets $110k of that and the employer takes the other $90k.
For specific agencies with a great workforce, it is worse than this.
we've been losing a great deal of technical expertise recently to industry, where Fortune 500s are offering compensation packages 200% to 250% higher than the current compensation of federal contractors & technical civil servants.
I was interviewed for a friend who was applying for clearance. They spent an awful lot of time asking me about his hypothetical interest in child porn. I didn't bother asking why at the time; I've been told that their primary interest in such questions is making sure that somebody doesn't have obvious points of leverage for blackmail.
> who go through rudimentary security clearance checks and have access to all this information.
But just getting a security clearance isn't enough to have access to "all this information", right? My understanding has been that getting security clearance can make one eligible to do work which would involve some specific sensitive information, but that stuff is still meant to be compartmentalized. There's no reason people who are working on e.g. the supply chain for some radar component need to have access to intel on some other country's chemical weapons and vice versa.
It's not really so much about the clearance as it is about network access. A tremendous amount of classified information is essentially public on the high side networks. So, if your job entails access to a classified network (particularly an IC one), you have a lot of reading you can do.
This situation is sort of intentional: one of the big findings of the 9/11 commission is that intelligence information was too siloized and analysts were missing big things because they didn't have access to products of other agencies. But there's a balancing act here, and this is the downside of open access.
So a sibling comment in this tree says there are "about one million US citizens have a top secret clearance" ... is it known roughly how many would have access to those IC networks?
I'm realizing my initial impression of the landscape here is also skewed by some peripheral awareness of how government contractors may have narrow access to specific material for their work. I understand why intentionally, some actual government employees have a much broader view. But how large is that group with broad access?
When it comes to classified networks, "SCIF" usually implies "JWICS." A quote from the DISA CIO [1] puts the JWICS user count at "hundreds of thousands."
Even better, a 2016 article about TS Intellipedia [2], the MediaWiki install on JWICS, says it has "255,402 registered users." That's probably pretty similar to the JWICS user count at the time.
I don't have the sense it's that well separated. Like Reality Winner was doing translations of persian aerospace program stuff when she leaked the russian election interference document.
I can't see how those could sensibly be in the same domain. I imagine it's about like any other huge collection of data, with large variance in how well things are categorized and restricted.
It was reported in the news today that the USA is looking to tighten access to classified material as, currently, about one million US citizens have a top secret clearance.
While it would be intractable to upend the status quo of about 0.5% of American adults using that access to get things done day-to-day, there's a lot that could be improved just by compartmentalizing that access and monitoring it.
It's one thing for an IT admin on a Massachusetts national guard post to get access to a few local secrets. It's another when he's downloading hundreds of documents unrelated to his duties on a war thousands of miles away.
Your average file share or web server for a medium-sized corporation with a negligible amount of confidential data probably has that level of monitoring, it's not particularly surprising that the slower-moving military doesn't yet but it probably should.
The shameful thing is this is the same scenario with the Manning leaks and nothing has been done to institute stronger access restrictions since. The military consistently refuses to operate by the same secrecy requirements that DoD contractors have to adhere to.
There is a constant ebb and flow between more sharing of information and less sharing of information. Bad things happen because of not sharing enough intel (eg. the 9/11 report)? Time to loosen restrictions. Bad things happen because of overly lax sharing of information (eg. Manning)? Time to lock things down. Both postures have costs and benefits that are difficult to quantify. This tends to cause knee-jerk reactions based on the latest crisis.
Failure to adapt to changing threat models. Used to be extortion, now it's just boredom. I imagine there have always been a few bored guards taking stuff home to show off at poker night, but that was as far as it went back then.
According to new WaPo article, "he was a junior member of the military, but had access to highly sensitive information through his role as an IT tech within the military organization."
UPD They changed the wording, the current version:
>Teixeira told members of the online group Thug Shaker Central that he worked as an technology support staffer for the Massachusetts Air National Guard and at a base on Cape Cod, and this was how he was able to access classified documents, one member of the Discord server told the Post.
It's the addiction of staff officer ranks (mostly Colonels, Generals), as well as senior agency executives and politicians, to paper hardcopies. They all want their briefing materials printed out so they can scribble in the margins and look important (and maybe share them with financial advisors and donors). Although some enlisted ranks have had authorized access to this stuff in the past (Chelsea Manning), in many cases they're downloading and printing it out for their superiors. Can't have these VIPs doing their own print jobs, can we? The lot of them should be fired as at best too stupid and lazy to serve.
There's a lot of trust on the internal systems, once you have clearance, to be able to access these docs. In this case, however, he might have been involved in creating some of these (or some kind of rollup product) and would therefore probably have access to different material to help support that creation.
Or its a Snowden situation and he has access because he has privileges on the system due to being a sys admin of some sort.
I agree. He claimed to have been working inside a SCIF on a regular basis. I'm sure the National Guard would have or have access to such a facility, and have the necessary clearances. But I don't see how an inactive or active-for-training guardsman could have a need to access that much information.
There are 19 year olds with TS clearances. Some jobs just require it. It can be written into an enlistment contract. National guard and reserve units of different kinds are also kind of known for having serious racism problems. Racists use it to network and meet other racists, get the training and some credibility without actually committing to active duty. That shit in active duty is not tolerated, usually cause it's actually diverse unlike a reserve unit in a place like Massachusetts.
Another problem with clearances in general is that often those eligible come from less diverse backgrounds due to parental citizenship considerations. fields that require a clearance are often less diverse because of this.
People who have some time in the military probably won't be surprised if the situation is what the media is portraying it to be. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out about the US, the biggest problems for the country will come from within.
Yeah, my question was not that he got the clearance (presumably his MOS required it, whether full-time active or not), but why he was going into a facility and getting these documents when his unit was not called into active federal duty. There wouldn't have been any need to know so he shouldn't have had access since you need both a clearance and need to know.
Given the large number of individuals that have access to such top secret documents, it is likely that enemies already are in the know of the sensitive information. Classifying information as top secret primarily functions to prevent the general public from the knowledge unless it is leaked to the press.
I've done sub-sub-contract work for a few government and military orgs where standard procedure would be I would be mailed a thumb drive of what should just be images and word docs to add functionality to a small section of an internal website. Every single time there would be things on there, totally unrelated to the project, that I should definitely not have been given.
Is it significant that the leaks were allegedly of photographs of printouts, with visible creases, as oppposed to being straight file-dumps? Maybe photographic a printout is better for opsec as opposed to files with some sort of DLP.
nah, TL;DR: he got mad the teens on his Discord weren't reading his typeouts of them and started posting photos because it was more titillating to see it in all its glory, with markings etc. (also, saved him time in his weird little god simulation, why should someone as wise and talented as him A) be mostly ignored B) waste a ton of time trying to help these fools?)
I was wondering the same thing. These leaks were briefings for the Joint Chiefs, right? He worked in intelligence, I could see him having some level of access, but I can't imagine him being read in on daily executive briefings
It's not even so much as database access as it was more likely a leak from on premises. AFAIK the leaked documents were photographs of physical printouts (they had visible creases in them).
owner == leaker, multiple sources on that, then we see his family's reaction. Still not 100% clear its 100% confirmed but shy of him admitting it, probably best we'll get.
>Later, someone who appeared to be Airman Teixeira drove onto the property in a red pickup truck.
>When Times reporters approached the house again, the truck was parked in the driveway. Airman Teixeira’s mother and a man were standing outside in the driveway.
>When asked if Airman Teixeira was there and willing to speak, the man said: “He needs to get an attorney if things are flowing the way they are going right now. The Feds will be around soon, I’m sure.”
The guy is on video shooting his own high caliber weapons , yelling racist tirades, and if he doesn't resist, about to be in prison for a long time. Feel free to go arrest him yourself with a taser and handcuffs.
It's crazy that hes still out. Everyone learned of the name "Thug Shaker Central" 5 days ago, yet the government can't subpoena Discord for the 20 odd people on there and match it with enlisted? One of these "what is all that money going to" moments.
"Once you get past the perimeter, all bets are off" is the military's approach to security. This pervasive thinking has caused a lot of nightmares in infosec with the likes of Lockheed introducing "cyber killchain" to big corporations.
They focus on the perimeter and who gets access and how.
They essentially have RBAC but not mandatory access control. Your role gets you past a perimeter or a security control but access to data is granted implicitly not explicitly.
What the infosec community has learned is that defense is best done "in depth" or "layered". Even if he needed that information for his work and permission was given to him explicitly why was he allowed to download files? Why was he able to get any sort of electronics in or out of any facility that stored top secret information? How come there was no DLP or hard to defeat watermarking on documents? Document canaries to detect a leak? I mean even in a typical corporate O365 deployment, you can classify documents so that they are encrypted by MSIP so even if you take the document home and open it, you need to authenticate to decrypt it (and that is logged of course), he can take screenshots but you can monitor that too and he needs to get that screenshot out (and hopefully TS clearance computers don't have internet access or USB ports or mass storage device support).
I don't agree that the problem is a million people have clearance. That clearance should mean you will be allowed to request access to documente and have that granted if you need those specific docs, it shouldn't mean access is implied.
And a bit controversial take: this is why the USG can't go easy or forget about assange or snowden and others. They can make a case in court or convince a jury they had no option but to leak classified info but DoJ would be incompetent if it didn't go after all leakers regardless of context.
Manning got 35 years, although her sentence was commuted by Obama because she was arguably a "whistleblower."
Makes you wonder if Russian agents somehow got in his head. Impressionable 21 year old kids with access to the boss's computer to update IE will do stupdi things for the "100" reaction emoji on Discord.
If you read the Washington Post article it's pretty clear he was showing off for some online friends. He was even getting mad that they weren't paying attention.
It's pretty funny that the US has to deal with both a recruitment crisis, and the fact that the recruits they manage to get are willing to be charged under the espionage act for the sake of internet arguments. They really just can't catch a break
It used to be you could make a movie about this because it would involve spies and treason or somesuch. Today's national security risk is some guy wanting recognition from his couple online friends.
Is based off anything or just unnecessary political dividing rhetoric? If you want to be mad at a president pardoning a traitor be mad at Obama, since that was something that actually happened.
I am sure FBI will find that "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case." as it usually does in cases of leaking classified info :) :) :)
He's going to be court martialed for a UCMJ Article 106(a) violation. Even if he were hauled up in a civilian court, he's got nothing to bargain with -- he transmitted classified military and IC docs to foreign citizens for the Discord clout, so has nothing to graymail with and no information about foreign intelligence services to trade. Dude's absolutely, completely, comprehensively screwed, and is going to spend the next few decades bunking in a Leavenworth six-by cell.
Yeah secretary of state having IT set up a server for her blackberry in 2006 is the same as a 22 year old forcing 16 year olds on his discord to read top secret docs
Is it a young guy in a brown/grey t-shirt and red shorts with his hands on his head walking backwards past what appears to be an Army truck and being handcuffed by armed folks in military garb?
Not proven by facts in evidence! The FBI prioritizes (in theory) successful prosecution. It’s entirely possible that there are agents watching the guy while a judge processes a warrant.
I'd assume they're not concerned about further leaks from this individual A.) if they've already identified him and have been monitoring him, and B.) he realizes the gravity of his situation and is spooked, resulting in him not leaking anything else since this story blew up.
It would be on other bodies (correct me if I'm wrong) to review and adjust the internal practices around the handling of confidential documents, and how this can be prevented moving forward.
Or 2. Do comprehensive physical and electronic surveillance for say 24-72 hours to see if they try to get in contact with foreign nationals, and investigate whether they have a "dead man's switch" to release more documents?
Option 2 makes more sense to me. When cleaning this situation up it will be essential to know what he leaked and who he leaked it to. Unfortunately the NYT and Bellingcat may have forced law enforcement to move prematurely. That or friendly media got a tipoff to establish the desired narrative while the government does the "no comment during an active investigation" line.
This story just doesn't compute with me. A young guy (21) seemingly had access to all this information, and shared it despite being Portuguese (based on his last name) so seemingly not ethnically tied to Russia, shared it openly on Discord with his gaming club, a full document dump literally hundreds of pages not just screenshots or summaries, but not before faking some of the information, coordinated by a group that has members in Ukraine so seemingly they don't love Russia, the NYT knows more than Biden simply by having honed in internet stalking tactics, everyone and his Mom gave media interviews on request, and the one picture the media could find of him he's standing in the shadows like Batman.
EDIT: I don't why I'm replying to everyone, yall are too much. I'm not conceding but I'm "deleting" my account so I'm not tempted to keep defending myself.
Why does it have to make sense? kids (and a 21 year-old is certainly not a full-grown adult) do stupid things all the time.
For example, as James Zhong claimed[0]:
>He recalled converting some of his Bitcoin into $700,000 in cash. He stated he did this so that he would have a “case full of money like in the movies.” He hoped the visual appeal of the cash would impress a female into having sexual relations with him. He stated his plan did not work.
Maybe this kid did it to impress his Discord buddies? Maybe he did it for shits & giggles. Presumably, we'll find out more as time goes by.
>despite being Portuguese (based on his last name)
My last name is English, but I'm not from England. I was born in the US, the child of an American citizen too. How could that possibly happen?
I've met at least half a dozen native-born Americans with the name 'Teixeira'. Why do you assume he's a foreign national? By that logic, this guy[1] must be a "furriner" too, eh?
Your link is a about a bitcoin case, so unless I missed something this guy wasn't doing it for money (I don't condone it, but money is a reasonable motive for committing a crime).
And I said based on his last name he doesn't appear to be ethnically Russian. Why are you going on about foreign nationals?
>Your link is a about a bitcoin case, so unless I missed something this guy wasn't doing it for money (I don't condone it, but money is a reasonable motive for committing a crime).
My point was that they were both kids when they did these stupid things (with Zhong, I'm not talking about stealing bitcoin -- he thought that it would "cool" to have a suitcase full of cash and that it might impress some college coed to fuck him -- hell I even quoted it for you).
Besides, What does your assessment as to what's reasonable have to do with what Jack Teixeira thought was a good idea?
>And I said based on his last name he doesn't appear to be ethnically Russian. Why are you going on about foreign nationals?
Because it's pretty obvious this guy isn't a spook/source for any foreign government. Which was implied by your noting the source of his last name?
And even if he was a spy for Russia or Brazil or Portugal or Grand Fenwick, for that matter, what does his name have to do with it?
why would it matter whether his name is 'Teixeira' or 'Smith' or 'Brin' or 'Nahasaheemapetalan'?
Actual spies like Whittaker Chambers[0] and Alger Hiss[1] didn't have "russian" names. Please.
> suitcase full of cash and that it might impress some college coed to fuck
I think the sex in that story is a red herring. If you have a suitcase full of 700 grand you don't need to impressive anyone to have sex. If you have a bunch of illicit bitcoins converting that into cash also makes sense without bringing sex into it. Money makes sense as a motive.
> What does your assessment as to what's reasonable have to do with what Jack Teixeira thought was a good idea?
A crime like this needs a motive.
> this guy isn't a spook/source for any foreign government
We're on the same page. What I'm saying is if this guy was a spook the story would start to make sense. But it doesn't look like he is.
> what does his name have to do with it?
I'll go out on a limb and say the average person who's last name is Putin has more loyalty to the Russian government than someone who's last name is Teixeira.
> Actual spies [...] didn't have "russian" names
It's funny. In a parallel thread I'm being accused of thinking Cold War spy stories are real, and here's two men whose entire Wikipedia articles read like spy thrillers.
I'm not checking if this guy is a spy, just that some sort of evidence of Russian sympathies would make this all easier to swallow.
People who don't understand the system think leaking classified data is either James Bond nonsense or its like Trade Secrets where once the cat's out of the bag and its public it doesn't matter.
Say you're arguing about the top speed of an aircraft carrier or some BS, the topic doesn't actually matter. The top speed is classified but you know what it is and its documented in writing you know what it is. You google for the public answer of the top speed. Some wise ass engineer on Quora uses basic fluid dynamics and hydrology principles to calculate it must be darn near Z knots and you know for a fact its exactly Z knots you plagiarize the guy or quote him, BAM if the NYT has an axe to grind about it, you're now a felon. That's how classified data works. Its content based not process based. You can't avoid prosecution using a google search or chatGPT log or a torrent file or a link to wikileaks as a magic shield, the legal structure doesn't work that way, sorry kid.
Another way to get caught is "wikipedia paraphrases the classified document I have including exact numbers and everything ... obviously my classified document must have been declassified a long time ago, no danger in quoting my original, right?" Nope, insta-felony.
Now usually if you avoid getting documented in the NYT, if you are just quoting some nonsense you downloaded from the internet that everyone has a copy of anyway, the punishment is not quite as severe as if you sold files to Russia in exchange for coke and hookers.
If everyone on the planet already knew about it except the American public who paid for it, usually not get into much trouble, but you will get into trouble.
It's an interesting security problem to guard against. If you want to F up the American War Machine almost for free, post a bunch of 'stolen' classified docs on some Portuguese (or whatever) web server and wait for the Americans to prosecute themselves for quoting the posts.
I had a clearance in the Army and no matter how many times they teach the class there's people who just don't get it, even if everyone in the world knows about ... Israeli nuclear weapons, for example, you personally are not allowed to talk about it once you're read in. Everyone on the planet can talk about it and every civvie can have a print out of those docs on their desk, but if you have a clearance you cannot talk about it.
This makes more sense than some Cold War spy thriller story.
The amount of times people leaked classified information to win an argument on the Warthunder forums and discord alone proves that intelligence agencies have nothing on borderline teens that want to score points on the internet.
Name the most nonsensical camp b-rated Bollywood spy thriller you've ever seen, one where actors land on their feet after getting blown 50 feet into the air. It still makes more sense than this.
>Name the most nonsensical camp b-rated Bollywood spy thriller you've ever seen, one where actors land on their feet after getting blown 50 feet into the air. It still makes more sense than this.
Why does it it need to "make sense" -- to you (or me, for that matter)?
I'm sure it made sense to this kid, at least on some level(s). I remember when I was 21. I did all kinds of stupid shit -- often for no reason other than I felt like it at the moment -- even when I regretted it later.
I'm probably lucky I didn't have a security clearance or I might have ended up just like this kid.
And I keep using that word: kid. And it absolutely does mean what I think it means. A 21 year old is (with very few exceptions) not yet an adult[0]:
Although the brain stops growing in size by early adolescence, the teen years
are all about fine-tuning how the brain works. The brain finishes developing
and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the
forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature.
This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making
good decisions.
"Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games"
Based on the above, maybe one of them was an alt-right type? A lot of the right wing in this country supports Russia.
I think you're overcomplicating it, from the accounts given of his behavior in other articles it seems like it was just a massive egotrip for him. He enjoyed the attention and clout he got from seemingly 'predicting' what was going to happen.
“A social-media account overseen by a former U.S. Navy noncommissioned officer—a prominent online voice supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine—played a key role in the spread of intelligence documents allegedly leaked by Airman First Class Jack Teixeira, reposting files from obscure online chat rooms,”
Is it not two different people? The dumbshit who shared the info with his friends, and then someone else in the group leaked it to the public. At least that's the impression I got so far.
The whole thing is cockamamie and muddled by design. Is this a real leak that someone wants people to think is phony? Is this a phony leak that someone wants people to think is real? It is both?
We are not supposed to know, and that is the point.
It’s amazing how much Russiagate has rotted peoples brains that they even considered “Russia” as a suspect. As if the motives/outcomes of the disclosure align with their interests whatsoever, not to mention the Discord origin. Newsflash: if it were Russia, they would have just kept it quiet and killed the moles.
