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Online Bloviators Spill US Classified Secrets

Teixeira charged and looks like he'll be held without bail. Justice sure be swiffer'n a motherfucker when you're just some average dude taking classified documents home. It'll probably be a month of Sundays before Trumpty Dumpty sees the inside of a courtroom.
 
They are now reporting that he could get up to 15 years in prison. He would be 36 when he got out, if he served the entire term. The case is so prominent that he'll probably get a severe penalty to scare potential copycats, and they'll reduce it later. This is really tragic when you consider that the guy is so young and had his whole life ahead of him. Now his path forward is full of obstacles because of this horrible lapse in judgment.
 
He's almost certainly getting a dishonorable discharge. Good luck to him finding work if he gets out of prison. I doubt that they'll change which jobs require a clearance.
 
The guy was basically leaking for the likes and clicks. Enjoy Leavenworth.

www.nytimes.com

Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known

A Discord user matching the profile of Jack Teixeira distributed intelligence to a larger chat group, days after the beginning of the Ukraine war.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

The Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents to a small group of gamers had been posting sensitive information months earlier than previously known and to a much larger chat group, according to online postings reviewed by The New York Times.

In February 2022, soon after the invasion of Ukraine, a user profile matching that of Airman Jack Teixeira began posting secret intelligence on the Russian war effort on a previously undisclosed chat group on Discord, a social media platform popular among gamers. The chat group contained about 600 members.
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The Times learned about the larger chat room from a Discord user. Unlike Thug Shaker Central, the second chat room was publicly listed on a YouTube channel and was easily accessed in seconds.
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It appears the first leak came less than 48 hours into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Saw a pentagon report saying that ⅓rd of the force is being used to invade,” the user wrote. Apparently eager to impress others in the group who questioned his analysis, he said: “I have a little more than open source info. Perks of being in a USAF intel unit,” referring to the United States Air Force.
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Airman Teixeira also claimed that he was actively combing classified computer networks for material on the Ukraine war. When one of the Discord users urged him not to abuse his access to classified intelligence, Teixeira replied: “too late.”
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bilby said:
Whatever happened to "need to know"? How does an Air National Guard airman based in the USA have any need to know about Pentagon force assessments for Russian troops invading Ukraine?
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Excellent question. "Need to know" became "need to share", because the agencies were stovepiped to the extent that information vital to detecting threats was in possession of the government but not available to all agencies that needed to know about the threats. This is part of the answer to the question of how someone like Teixeira was able to get a Top Secret clearance. After the change, they needed to expand the number of people with high level security clearances.

Our classified leaks conundrum: ‘Need to know’ became ‘a need to share’​

 
bilby said:
Whatever happened to "need to know"? How does an Air National Guard airman based in the USA have any need to know about Pentagon force assessments for Russian troops invading Ukraine?
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The problem with "need to know" is information is so compartmentalized it becomes difficult to piece together the big picture. One analyst might be tracking Ahmed the terrorist and someone else has got relevant information that never makes it to the first guy's screen because neither one has any idea what the other is working on. After 9/11 they loosened things up some for just this purpose. Problem is there are over a million people with top secret clearances. I think it's commendable that this doesn't happen more often.

But still, a 21 year old E-3 should not have had such access. It sounds like he was the IT that gave others access as needed. On my last ship, a mean old senior chief was in charge of giving access to the SIPRNET and you got access to just the folders you needed access to as per your department head.

Now that pretty young man is going to prison.
 
Guess who likes him.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 on Twitter: "Jake Teixeira is ..." / Twitter
Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar.

That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.

And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.

Ask yourself who is the real enemy?

A young low level national guardsmen?

Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?
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She's in the House's Homeland Security Committee -- Speaker Kevin McCarthy seems desperate for her support.
 
No matter how you look at this, it's a complete failure of US intelligence apparatus. The fact that this guy got the security clearance and was able to smuggle top secret documents to his home is one thing, but not getting caught for over a year is another. If he'd been tracked down last year after the first few leaks, the damage would have been small. But he didn't, got bolder and probably thought there weren't going to be any repercussions, and here we are now.

One way to catch spies and leakers would be to watermark the documents or have slight differences that could be spotted. For example, have two sets of presentations, one where Ukrainian casualties are 16.1k and another one where they are 16.2k. Insignificant difference, but if one of those numbers pops up on the internet, you can narrow down the list of suspects.
 
Jayjay said:
No matter how you look at this, it's a complete failure of US intelligence apparatus. The fact that this guy got the security clearance and was able to smuggle top secret documents to his home is one thing, but not getting caught for over a year is another. If he'd been tracked down last year after the first few leaks, the damage would have been small. But he didn't, got bolder and probably thought there weren't going to be any repercussions, and here we are now.
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I'm pretty sure that the government knows this and will write up a report to say the same thing. Then they will classify the report and it will eventually get leaked on the internet.


Jayjay said:
One way to catch spies and leakers would be to watermark the documents or have slight differences that could be spotted. For example, have two sets of presentations, one where Ukrainian casualties are 16.1k and another one where they are 16.2k. Insignificant difference, but if one of those numbers pops up on the internet, you can narrow down the list of suspects.
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The documents exist in digital form and can be copied. People are forbidden from carrying flash drives or any equipment that can copy such materials into a SCIF, but this kid was a sysadmin. So he likely had more access to the materials than ordinary consumers of the material. You can be sure that the people in charge of these secure networks are well aware of the danger and have many better ideas of how to deal with it than you can come up with. In my experience with the problem (based on having worked with it), the absolute greatest fear and acknowledged danger was the prospect of an insider deciding to compromise security. Edward Snowden was a perfect example of how easy it was for an insider to steal classified information and leak it to hostile intelligence agencies. All you need is one person deciding to go rogue for whatever reason--money, ideology, a desire to brag about access, etc.

Stopping intruders is far easier than policing insiders. One can always set up "honeypots"--bogus caches of secure data--to entrap outsiders trying to penetrate a system, among other techniques. However, insiders are less likely to fall for such ploys. They are usually aware of all the defenses. Teixeira got away with this for so long because there are a lot of online gaming communities out there and there are strong barriers to monitoring private services like Discord chat rooms without a FISA warrant. US intelligence agencies are less able to penetrate them than the Russians, who have likely been exploiting them for a while. It is even possible that Teixeira was encouraged to continue leaking information by the GRU, FSB, or agencies from other hostile countries.
 
I've changed my mind about this young man being just a somewhat clueless twit who was out of his depth. Apparently, he is the kind of person that red flag laws are about. That is, he had a past history of conspiracy-driven violence and racism and had been collecting an arsenal of lethal weapons. It is truly scandalous that he managed to acquire a Top Secret clearance with that kind of background. How did he manage to get into such a sensitive position in an Air Force intelligence unit? Did they not investigate his background at all?

Airman Accused of Leak Has History of Racist and Violent Remarks, Filing Says​


Prosecutors pointedly questioned Airman Teixeira’s overall state of mind, disclosing that he was suspended from high school in 2018 for alarming comments about the use of Molotov cocktails and other weapons, and trawled the internet for information about mass shootings. He engaged in “regular discussions about violence and murder” on the same social media platform, Discord, that he used to post classified information, the filing said, and he surrounded his bed at his parents’ house with firearms and tactical gear.

Airman Teixeira was also prone to making “racial threats,” prosecutors said.
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Investigators found a small arsenal in his bedroom at the house he shared with his mother and stepfather. Inside a gun locker two feet from his bed, law enforcement officials found multiple weapons, including handguns, bolt-action rifles, shotguns, an AK-style high-capacity weapon and a gas mask. F.B.I. special agents also found ammunition, tactical pouches and what appeared to be a silencer-style accessory in his desk drawer.

This behavior — so disturbing it was flagged by local police when he applied for a firearms identification card — is certain to raise new questions about how Airman Teixeira obtained a top-secret security clearance that gave him access to some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence reports.
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Prosecutors also made public a series of social media posts from 2022 and 2023 in which Airman Teixeira expressed his desire to kill a “ton of people” and cull the “weak minded,” and described what he called an “assassination van” that would cruise around killing people in a “crowded urban or suburban environment.”
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It is beyond reason that his superiors in the intelligence unit would escape the fallout:

Prosecutors allege Pentagon leak suspect Jack Teixeira accessed 'hundreds of classified documents'​


Wednesday's filing came as two leaders of the unit where Teixeira worked were temporarily suspended by the U.S. Air Force amid its ongoing investigation into the leak.

The two senior leaders are the commander of the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron and the detachment commander overseeing administrative support for the squadron. With the suspension, they have also temporarily lost access to classified systems and information.
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From CNN.

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In comments cited in court filings late Wednesday night, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, spoke of wanting to “kill a [expletive] ton of people” because it would be “culling the weak minded,” and discussed wanting to make a minivan into an “assassination van.”

At his home in Massachusetts, prosecutors say, Teixeira had access to an “arsenal” of weapons and accessories – including handguns, bolt-action rifles, shotguns, an AK-style high-capacity weapon, a gas mask, ammunition, tactical pouches, and a “silencer-style accessory” – all of which he kept in his bedroom.
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This moron was mentally unbalanced. Culling the weak minded? Assasination van?
 

Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, is expected to plead guilty to charges related to his alleged leaking, opens new tab of classified military information on a social media platform in what was one of the most serious U.S. national security breaches in years, according to a court filing, opens new tab.

Federal prosecutors asked a judge in Boston to schedule a Monday hearing for Teixeira, 22, to change his plea following his arrest in April on charges he leaked classified documents to a group of gamers on the messaging app Discord.

The material included highly sensitive U.S. military assessments, including on the war in Ukraine.

Further information, including what charges Teixeira would plead guilty to, was not immediately available. He had been facing six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information relating to national defense.
 
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