This whole Jack Teixeira thing interests me for some reason. Now info is coming out that he was caught a few times taking notes, (link goes to CNN) inside a SCIF, on classified information and had been told to quit it, but nothing more was done.
The memos showed that Teixeira, a 21-year-old junior enlisted airman who worked within the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing, had received a direct order from his superiors to stop taking notes on intelligence, which they found he was ignoring just a month later. And just months before he was arrested for allegedly sharing the intelligence online, a third memo said a supervisor observed him accessing intelligence unrelated to his job.
Some people on other boards (I know) are positing that maybe Teixeira was being used to transmit misinformation/counterintelligence, and that’s why his superiors allowed him to continue taking notes and posting stuff on discord rather than stripping him of his clearance, booting him, etc.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me, but maybe it makes more sense than thinking his supervisors were just too lazy to address what he was doing. Opinions?
I have no real opinion on that, but that is one of the theories I heard from Day 1 (or near enough), and also that US adversaries are taking the leaked intelligence with a grain of salt, assuming it to be misinformation that was intended to leak. How anyone would know that, I don’t know. I could go either way on this one, but I tend to lean towards the idea that it’s stupidity and incompetence rather than spy games.
Me, too, really. It seems more likely to be laziness and incompetence than some more complicated plot. But that amazes me also. I would have thought someone, especially a low-ranking worker with no particular clout, would be dismissed or at least suspended upon the first instance of being caught copying and pocketing classified information they didn’t actually need for their job.
I rather doubt it was that complex and that US intelligence was using a low-level guy like Teixeira in a cunning way. Rather, the US intelligence community can be astonishingly careless about things. If you read the stories about Aldrich Ames, the CIA was stunningly lax, allowing him to get away with numerous blatant red-flag behaviors or things.
Not just the US, Intelligence communities like to project an aura of uber-competence which doesn’t really appear to be merited on closer examination. But then I suppose in that field image is half the battle.
In my experience these are giant offices with dozens/hundreds of administrative workers who are regularly going in and out of controlled/classified info areas, and regularly moving classified materials from one place to another, all mostly with legal and legitimate purpose, such that it really wouldn’t be that hard for a bad actor who already has a clearance to deliberately release classified info.
So “normal” supervisory mistakes seems more likely to me.
The bigger problem, ISTM, is that the clearance process didn’t note several obvious red flags in Teixeira’s background. The system works as long as the people with clearances have good intentions, and that’s what the clearance and background process is supposed to ensure. It obviously failed here, and from what I can tell a competent investigator would have denied him a clearance.
Humans are humans. We don’t like confrontation, we want to trust that our people are good people doing good things, etc.
A somewhat more plausible reasoning than outright conspiracy would be that his commanders were friends with his parents, and so he was getting a little bit of a pass on his “overexuberance”. But, far more plausible than that is that his commander asked him what he was doing, he made some excuse, and the commander bought it and didn’t think much about it.
That’s a good point about the clearance issues in this case. He most likely should never have been eligible for clearance to start with. I’d forgotten about that aspect. Definitely somebody messed up there.
Posters on other forums suggested that maybe this guy was given wider leeway because his stepfather had retired from the military not long before Teixeira joined the same “wing” the stepfather retired from.
I’ll have to go that’s not even a decent try at a whacked-out nutjob conspiracy theory. If the deep state government had actually been using him for that purpose, then those superiors knew about it and would not have stopped him or curtailed his actions.
Why didn’t they remove his clearance? I’d venture the simplest explanation is that if they had, then they would not have someone to get a job done. The failure here is that they did not follow up and ensure he corrected his behavior. His AFSC is Cyber Transport Systems Journeyman which evidently is keeping the electronic communications systems working correctly. That would give him access to whatever classified data is transmitted or stored on the unit’s systems, but of course not for him to copy and distribute it far and wide to gain cred.
The only thing I’ve seen is reporting on the case where it’s been mentioned
And a few years earlier, Teixeira “was suspended in high school based on concerning comments (he) made about Molotov cocktails and other weapons,” the motion said.
o support detention without bond, prosecutors also raised an incident from while Teixeira was a high school sophomore in 2018 that resulted in his suspension from school and prevented him from obtaining a gun license until he joined the National Guard.
Actually, ISTM that he shouldn’t’ve even been allowed to join the military with that kind of record.
There’s the old saw, “never attribute to malice anything that can be attributed to stupidity.” In this case, “malice” would be the goal of conveying misinformation to Russia. That’s possible, but it’s far more likely that the people in charge just screwed up in letting Teixeira continue to access classified info after numerous instances of misconduct.
Maybe this all stems from the widely held belief that rightwing authoritarianism has some good points, and people on the conservative side of politics are extremely tolerant of those who express rightwing authoritarian views? “Not everything Hitler thought was bad” should be an ejection point, not a talking point.
I think the idea would be more that they knew he was up to no good so they fed him false information in the files he was able to access. If they were wrong, and he was honest, then nothing is really lost. If they were right, then, hey, the fake info is what gets leaked.
Of course who is the “they”? If his immediate supervisors became aware he was misusing his access, they have no authority to invent fake info, place it in front of him, hope he finds that instead of real info, and spreads it to the world.
Any official action to make him an unwitting controlled leaker would have to be approved waaay up the sneaky side of the chain of command. And would have had to somehow insulate him from stuff they really didn’t want leaked. He’d have to have his access switched to be living only in his own custom-created-just-for-him bubble of classified disinformation. Without him noticing anything had changed. Good luck with that.
If he was a knowing witting leaker actively recruited by whoever from whatever shadowy agency, why is he not protesting that now while he can? “They fed me this stuff on purpose so I could spread it. I was just doing the job I was given.” would be an effective defense at least in the court of public opinion. And would put a lot of doubt in the minds of the military court that will be trying him.
At which point this CT utterly shows its inherent wackiness to anyone who’s ever thought a bit about bureaucracy or secrecy.
Something that CT’ists and bad writers have in common: when they try to tackle hierarchical organizations with complex bureaucracies, the contours of the organizations they describe in practice are so shallow as to be virtually flat (which in turn suggests a more horizontal, I daresay even perhaps egalitarian, structure). Like, they just imagine there is one person or a very small number of people (a cabal or committee) who are simultaneously very high up in the organizational structure, wielding immense power, and yet not very far removed at all from every single occupant of the lowest rungs, such that they can get anyone to do anything without the need for or risk of intermediates who might intervene one way or the other.
Heck, even otherwise good writers who can write compelling characters and dialogue for tight, character-driven drama can fall into this trap.
I would have stupidly assumed that they would have some other junior personnel with similar job duties who could fill in, change shifts, do overtime, etc., at least temporarily. He wasn’t the only person who could do that job, surely. But I don’t know how the military works.
I keep saying it, but I’m just so surprised that they knew he was using the info outside of his scope of work and basically just said “stop doing that.” No other disciplinary action at all and even offered him a different position after they knew he continued to offend. WTF?
I’m sure that this common idiot saw the same game he was playing with his friends play out at work among his superiors. They would have enhanced their own status according to the level of classification and secrecy in the information available to them, and demonstrate little or no caution concerning the importance of keeping that information secret. We can see it happening all the way to the very top of the chain of command where classified documents were left unattended in people’s garages and stolen by former employees of the government and kept in their private Florida estates. It has been said that a local library has a better idea who has overdue books out than our government has about who is in possession of what we consider our most valuable state secrets. There was no counterintelligence work here, this was just a continuing mess created by over classification of documents, a lack of procedures to maintain secrets, and a complete lack of the loyalty and work ethic needed to operate our intelligence agencies up and down the line.
My sense is that it has more to do with the military’s failure to recognize low-level IT support personnel as one of at least two weak-points in the system. What you describe is another weak point, but I think more likely to be found only at the very highest levels where you have leaders who are not accustomed to being held accountable because they are just that senior (the President, for example, but also general or flag officers and possibly their senior staff officers or operational unit commanders–anyone who doesn’t have to account for every second of there day to someone else, basically). By contrast, Teixeira operated in the paradoxical realm where access is supposed to be narrowly limited according to need to know, and yet nothing has been done to effectively limit the access of low-level functionaries who maintain access to networks with classified information.
I saw this first hand being in charge of the IT personnel on a small forward deployed ship. I was in charge of the ITs, but where my access was limited based on need to know for my operational duties they, as admins, had full access to everything on the ship’s network and many things beyond the ship’s network. Does that make any sense? No.
And yet the one classified materials incident we had was just so utterly ridiculous, in a Kafkaesque sort of way. It involved opening a safe with someone in the room who wasn’t cleared to have access what was in the safe. And of course they didn’t, in any practical sense, have access to what was in the safe. They were merely in the room, along with half a dozen other people who were cleared and were standing between them and the safe, when the safe was open. But that right there? A reportable breach, apparently. Which we did of course report.
By contrast, because the military is so willfully blind to the paradox of restricting access of mid-level unit leaders even while granting full access to their subordinates, the kind of shit Teixeira pulled just gets shrugged off as typical “junior people being immature” kind of stuff. Until something like this happens, and all of the sudden everyone up to the President is like “How the hell did this happen!?”
Well, you give a bunch of 19/20-year olds unrestricted access to classified systems, what do you think is going to happen? I had a TS/SCI clearance throughout my 14-year career, but never saw anything above secret because I never had a need to know. But junior personnel like Teixeira, acting in a support role? Cartefreakingblanche.