For those of you who haven’t been following the news, Jack Teixeira is a 21 year old National Guard airman who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly leaking top secret documents. This thread isn’t really about what he’s accused of doing, it’s about all the people who seem shocked that 21 year old might have access to sensitive material. I get it. Like most Dopers, my youthful days are long behind me and I’ll admit that I’m not the same person in my late 40s that I was in my early twenties. I’ve grown and matured as a person (even if my wife doesn’t agree).
But at 21 I was what’s known as a grown ass man. I was a young man, yes, but I was aware of my responsibilities, understood the consequences of my actions (for the most part), and I could be trusted to handle important and/or sensitive tasks. So why are people making such a big deal out of Teixeira’s age?
I joined the AF when I was 17. They beat security into us on an almost hourly basis. I knew very well by the time I got out of Basic Training that I was not supposed to talk about that sort of stuff.
I was given a top secret clearance within 6 months and that took the FBI visiting old friends and cousins twice removed to be sure that I wouldn’t spill any secrets.
It was made very clear to me that despite being 17 years old, I was in the military and was considered to be an adult and that I would be treated like one if I screwed up with something serious like leaking top secret documents.
It’s like the people that support “very senior” people with things like meetings and presentations and making sure there are coffee and donuts are invisible or something… or the IT guys who make sure the computers and projectors and stuff are working for the meetings of the very senior people.
There is a massive amount of data to process and only so many qualified technical people in the services to do so. So much that they are using National Guard personal to assistace in processing the information, is that even normal? What was his civilian job? The fact that he was active in a gaming community was probably a plus as far as his qualificaions was concerned.
In my last govt job, I had a TS clearance, which meant I had access to the TS network. Had I been so inclined, I could have seen lots of stuff not related to my job. So it didn’t surprise me that he could get his hands on all manner of information.
On the other hand - WTF was he thinking?? When I first heard about the leak, I assumed it was either for $$$ or some ideological reason. It never occurred to me that some guy would take it to impress others. “Look at all this cool stuff I know!!” Really??
If he’s guilty, he should be locked away with no computer access ever. Classified information isn’t part of a game - people’s lives can be at stake! Sheesh.
I currently have S and a SIPR account. Yea, there’s lots of training, background checks, etc. But it’s not a foolproof system, and it ultimately depends on the ethics, honesty, and integrity of the clearance-holder. As we’re taught in stats class, there will always be outliers if the population is large enough.
Frankly, this extends beyond TS government/military information. I worked for many decades with payroll systems at a variety of clients. All of the teams had access to all personal and pay information, including SSN/Birthdate etc. The kind of information that could be valuable on the dark web. In all of my years I never once heard of anyone in my field accessing and sharing this type of information inappropriately.
The bottom line is that a vast vast VAST majority of people with access to sensitive information have integrity in these matters.
There was a lot of talk last summer around Trump’s document cache about how access to this stuff was highly compartmentalized. And over the past few days, I’ve learned that that’s just bullshit, that there’s this system with reams of quite sensitive classified stuff that about a million different people have access to.
Sure, they train the hell out of the people with access to it about the importance of only accessing the stuff that you have a work-related need to know, and the penalties for letting stuff slip out of the system. But that doesn’t stop people from actually doing these things they train you not to do. And when you have that many people with access to this river of classified info, it’s amazing that shit like this doesn’t happen more often.
But going back to the original question, yes, all that stuff we were told last summer formed impressions with many of us. I would have assumed that there’d be no need for National Guard to have access to this sort of stuff AT ALL, for one thing. And I’d have further assumed that to access classified info with serious national security implications, you’d have had to be in the service eight or ten years and be an E-5 or something, just to run the damn projector. (And I’d have assumed they wouldn’t even let the coffee-and-doughnut folks in the room when the projector was running.)
So yeah, I’m taken aback that it’s totally common for a 21 year old to have been trusted with access to information that might make a major difference in Ukraine’s ability to mount an offensive this year. People here saying, “yeah, that’s just how it is,” make me feel like my head’s about to explode.
You can’t just assume a million people can be trusted, no matter how much training you drill into them. That’s fucking insane.
Jesus only had 12 disciples, and not all of them could be trusted.
There’s a five-letter acronym summarizing the purported reasons why people commit treason: SMICE. It stands for:
Sex
Money
Ideology
Compromise (i.e., blackmail)
Ego
This guy sounds like a pretty clear case of ‘Ego’, although that weird bunch he hangs out with and their focus on “guns, God and country” makes me wonder if there’s some ideology mixed in. He reminds me a little of Edward Snowden, who IMO was more motivated by ego than the ideological reasons he cooked up. FWIW Snowden too was heavily into gaming.
When I got hired during the Cold War, they had zero tolerance for any socialst or communist leanings when screening people for security clearances. Hell, they asked me if I had relatives so inclined. But for decades (at least since Timothy McVeigh) I’ve been wondering when they were going to start being concerned about right-wing extremism. The security people were fighting the last war, and had way too much sympathy for right-wing nuts.
I too have had access to non-public PII most of my career. Besides having those damned morals & values that make me not want to do it. I wouldn’t know who to give it to, I mean I tried to have someone rubbed out at rent a hitman.com but that didn’t work out so well
I remember during the Obama administration, some part of the administration was going to list right-wing extremism as a security threat, and they got so much pushback from GOP Congresspersons and right-wing media that they dropped it.
If the Biden administration did this, there wouldn’t be as much pushback, and there’d be a much larger consensus that the pushback would be bullshit.
But another problem is that the security architecture of our country is dominated by people who lean (and then some) right. Whether it’s the local sheriff’s office or the FBI or the Secret Service, it doesn’t tend to be liberals who go into law enforcement.
And they often view other right-wingers more as allies than as threats. Remember the references by police to “armed friendlies” when members of right-wing paramilitary groups would show up during the George Floyd protests. And remember how Biden didn’t trust certain Secret Service agents when he first took office in the wake of the insurrection.
Count me as one who’s shocked IF I look at myself at 21. In every sense, I was an adult, except emotionally (for one thing, I was well on my way to being an alcoholic, having started drinking at 16–but now I’ve been sober for 23 years). So if I compare my 21-year old self with this kid, yeah, I’m shocked. But if I compare him to a lot of other people (most others, in fact), I shouldn’t be.
Hell, look at those who fought in WWII. Pilots bombing Germany were this kid’s age, or even younger.
So am I shocked? Yes and no. I have mixed feelings about it.
I don’t know why anyone considers it relevant that he was a computer gamer. Lots of people are gamers. It’s a common hobby. And probably especially so for people of his age, and for people who work in IT.
My read on Snowden was that he was primarily motivated by money, only to then discover that he couldn’t get paid nearly as well as he expected.
IIRC it was right after Obama took office, and the study identifying the threat of right-wing extremism had been performed by the George W. Bush administration. That didn’t stop many of my colleagues from crying “bias”. One guy declared that the government didn’t have to publish “every” study. Gee, no bias there.
That’s certainly possible, and would explain why he stole boatloads of information that had nothing to do with violations of Americans’ privacy, before deciding that what he was really concerned about was Americans’ privacy.
