Does anyone know the likely charges, whether or not they were actively associating with any governments or just for bragging rights, and what the resulting prison time is likely to be?
I mean, if it’s one where it’s based on number of times the documents are shared, they are utterly screwed, but I suspect at most it’s a per document thing.
In other words, are we talking years, decades, or life?
Too late to edit:
nationally/internationally.
Here’s a video on reddit I just saw that is painful to watch because the guy just screams for three solid minutes. (I kind of like him, but fair warning that his delivery is excruciating.)
I don’t know where he gets all his details, but the larger point he makes about how out of touch our ancient politicians are when it comes to technology is pretty spot-on.
He calls back to the cringy TikTok committee hearings last month when the CEO was getting grilled and imagines what the hearings will be like over this clusterfuck when they bring in the Discord CEO.
“I see on discord you have a thing called discord kittens. Tell me, does UwU mean good thing, yes or no?”
I laughed out loud at that bit. Then the other imagined example:
“We were reading through the chat logs here and it says ‘tracer rule 34 futa’. I was gonna try to look that up on my phone but my intern knocked my phone out of my hand. Is that part of the Chinese spy network?”
I’m reminded of when Blumenthal went on and on about finsta accounts:
He did not do my beloved state of Connecticut proud that day.
Stuff I’ve seen suggests he’s likely to be charged under the Espionage Act which carries a maximum 20 years/$10,000 fine per count. There were a lot of documents shared and I assume he made copies/photos over the course of weeks or more (versus taking one folder full of stuff) so I expect a lot of separate charges filed against him.
The Chelsea Manning leaks come to mind as a similar situation:
She ended up spending 7 years in prison.
For sake of a more complete picture of what Teixeira may face, Manning was sentenced to 35 years out of a potential 90 years. She only served 7 years because Obama commuted her remaining sentence.
Well, I hope one dies: Jack Teixeira.
Apparently this sort of thing (sharing military secrets on a gaming forum) isn’t new. I’m guessing the Chinese will be much less gentle than the DOJ. And that wasn’t the first time either.
The Brits had this problem too.
It remains to be seen whether the suspect had legitimate access to all the leaked classified material. Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, implied he might not.
http://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/14/politics/pentagon-leak-jack-teixeira-what-matters/index.html
That’s an incredibly weird story. Luckily it was only concerned with the gap between the turret and the hull rather than a massive leak of highly sensitive military and state insights, plans, opinions, and intel gathered by potentially vulnerable foreign assets.
Granted such information is still potentially devastating if it helps the enemy design a better anti-tank weapon or something, but this is not the same problem.
I’d like to know what sort of mandatory training someone like Teixeira would have gotten. I did mandatory bribery training at my work recently and it was very thorough. This is what can happen, these are the ways you might be breaking the rules without realising it, here are some case studies, and this is the length of the custodial sentence you will get for doing it, whether you realised you were breaking the law or not.
Surely for handling these classified documents Teixeira would have received an extremely clear and detailed education on what can happen, and what would happen to him, if such documents got leaked. And presuming this was the case he has very very little defence for his actions.
To be sure.
IMO the issue here is not that he was untrained nor unaware in an academic sense of what dumping this stuff to the public would mean for him if he got caught.
He was either confident he would not be caught, caught up in some partisan or online warrior fervor that precluded (or at least overrode) rational thought, or was just plain lousy at risk/reward analysis. More training will not to anything to reduce any of those risks.
Back when I was in USAF our unit had quite a library of secret and top secret stuff. All of which had been pre-vetted by somebody as appropriate to deliver to a base in the field. And little to none of which turned on larger issues about the US’ collective warfighting capability, interactions with allies, etc. And because it was all in the form of walls of 3-ring binders or bound books, it was hard to carry out sight unseen. Both in that it would have been hard to hide any given book, and that grabbing the whole trove would have required multiple van loads, a wheelbarrow, and lots and lots of time & sweat.
If indeed USAF or DoD has classified servers full of, well, darn near everything, and lots and lots of field workers, even including intel specialists, have access to the whole shebang, and have USB sticks that work, well, the “need to know” concept has comprehensively broken down institutionally. As has the idea of professional security librarians who in effect ask for each and every document before giving it to you: “Prove to me not only your clearance level but about how your job-related need to know applies to this particular document today.”
If DoD has bagged all that for the ease of the “honor system” amongst everyone with a clearance matching the page stamp, these events are statistically speaking, perfectly predictable. And almost certainly far more widespread than make the news.
Sounds like there are two scandals here. The ignorant / stupid kid, and the ignorant / stupid bureaucracy that made what he did even physically possible.
Here’s a little clarity on why the Massachusetts Air National Guard had all these documents in the first place:
Otis Air Base, the Cape Cod home to the Massachusetts Air National Guard, is one of a few northeastern bases for NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. This means one of its main missions is to detect, track, intercept, and defend against foreign incursions of U.S. air space.
As such, according to a former intelligence officer who still does high-level intelligence analysis, the base would routinely have access to reports and dispatches filed on the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System (JWICS, often pronounced J-Wicks)—and the key word here is worldwide. All information about foreign aircraft, air-defense weapons, military operations, and foreign-policy decisions would be swept up and transmitted throughout the system.
And here’s a good description of how the documents made it from the private Discord server to 4chan to Russian Telegram channels.
He was charged today with two counts of espionage, and prosecutors said they would seek 10 years on each of the counts.
The charges referenced only a single document, so it is possible that additional charges could be filed later.
Surprised it’s just that (not that potentially 20 years is nothing) but then there were complaints about Manning’s sentence being excessive – hence the commutation – so maybe they’re playing it more conservative with this one.
My initial thought is that is just the starting point - enough to get him arraigned and held.
I was chatting with my neighbors over coffee just now (something the guys in the cul de sac do on Saturday).
One guy brings up Airman Teixeira (he’s sort of local, Dighton is 15-20 miles away), asking what he was thinking. Another guy says, he’s thrown away 10 years of his life. I said, I’m more concerned that he’s gotten some Ukrainians killed or even US Special Forces or Agents.
Went over like a fart in church. Apparently Teixeira is a patriot and people fighting Russians are the traitors!
These are just upper middle class suburban white guys. Eight years ago, I would have bet their primary interest in politics was the marginal tax rate between 150k and 500k AGI.
Curiouser and curiouser: