It looks like the suspect is a 21-year old National Guard airman
I have so many questions
Why does a National Guard airman have access to this info?
why does a 21-year old have access to this info? He just barely got the right to drink alcohol. People’s full mental capacity is not reached until 25 as I recall.
why are people left alone with this data long enough that they can take photos of it, like he did?
What sort of clearance did this guy have and what secrecy level did this data have?
A lot of this comes down to the invisibility of administrative and IT support people. When senior decision makers have a meeting to discuss data like this who do you think sets up the meeting, make sure there’s coffee and donuts if the meeting is face-to-face, makes sure the computers and other machinery are working, especially if the meeting is virtual, makes copies of stuff and sends it to participants, and so forth? It ain’t the generals and admirals doing that. The general’s administrative assistant needs top secret clearance, too.
The suspect worked in IT. That’s how he could see this stuff and why he needed top secret clearance.
Why a 21 year old? Most people in military service are young. We issue full automatic weapons to 18 year olds and send them into combat if there’s a war on. You know those big aircraft carriers, the ones with airplanes flying on and off them and bombs and guns that are a major part of our navy? Average age of a crew member is 19. There are a lot of young people with a top secret clearance who need them because of the work they do for the military or government and the vast majority behave responsibility.
Age got nothin’ to do with it. Lot of very young people have TS clearances. Rank has nothing to do with it either - at least, it isn’t unusual for an E3, depending on their job. The main thing is what is sometimes called “need to know”, it isn’t just a matter of holding a TS clearance, that doesn’t give an individual the right to view or possess these materials.
It does look a little strange overall, from out here in the cheap seats, apparently these documents were prepared for people at a pretty high level, and they are quite varied, everything from Uke troop levels to diplomatic concerns with allies. He is a national guard member, so it seems a little out of the ordinary. It was considered a pretty big security breach, but these docs have been out in the aether for months.
He’s very well connected. The same reason much will be made of catching him, (too late!), but very few consequences will result, is my prediction.
His grandfather headed one of the units he was in and is a many years veteran. His mother, also long deep connections to military services. Pretty sure that’s how he ended up with access to sensitive info, and such an important position while still so young and inexperienced.
Much will be made of his ‘youthful indiscretion’, and public shame will be sufficient punishment, in the end, I predict.
There will be the appearance of some consequences, which could be a mere slap on the wrist and a barely interrupted military career likely.
If this was a young man of colour who actually earned his position, they’d be ready to hang him by now.
I don’t believe that his military family connections can help him in slightest at this point. The investagators are totally out of their sphere of influance.
As for his color, they are already ready to hang him at this point, both republicans and democrats in congress are lined up agaisnt him. I see no indication that he is getting any “white privilage” in this matter. They sent a armored military fighting vehicle to arrest him. Even if he was ba person of color they would not have shot him, becasue they need him alive so he can talk.
But to address the OP, at 21 you are considered a full adult and totally responsible for your actions. He can drink, get married, buy a house and die for his country. He is in no way a child in the eyes of the law, society or most importantly, the military. The question should be, how did his chain of command (the older, more responsible adults) fail and give him too much unresrited access?
If his service billet involved processing and relaying ELINT information, and his background check and quals were good, he had the clearance and the access. Plenty of 21 year olds like that in the Active and Guard components.
And Guard units are Army/Air Force units, this is not the 60s, they are integrated into the command structure and regularly are part of active operations. He worked for an AF Intelligence branch that happens to be administratively part of the MA Guard.
Nonfactual: If anything this brings up that the interviewing did not catch a character issue, and especially the on-the-job supervision failed.
Broomstick, I love you dearly but you have never been in Norfolk VA on a Friday night …
They act responsibly while on duty/on the boat/ship [unless they are duct taping someone to an overhead] out in town, holy shit. You mic Army, Navy and Marines, put them in a bar with booze, and stand back.
Hells bells, one doesn’t actually need to be military or have a clearance for certain things that could be important during war. I can sit in my house [if I had one, there is one currently for sale right where I would need it] and with a camera and a telescope I can monitor sailings from Submarine Base New London. If I were in proximity to any Navy base, with a bit of preparation I could provide sailing information by watching. [and believe me, they do not want fleet sailings to be watched too closely in the Silent Service. There is a reason the informal motto is ‘We Hide With Pride’] With some evesdropping, I can get all sorts of info from Army guys - who is in town, how is deployed … remember, loose lips sink ships.
This is actual horse puckey stuff trotted out by the “don’t legalize marijuana” crowd here in the last few years, a last ditch attempt to explain why young people should not have access to mind altering drugs (unless it’s alcohol).
IMHO your mental capacity is not reached until you are about a year or two less than my age, and then it seems to start going down again.
But yes, the facts of this case seem to indicate this guy was sufficiently mature that he would reveal sensitive military intel (while in the intelligence unit!!) just to impress his video game chat group peers.
A new article showed that some of this was photographs of printed material (so likely, harder to search online than actual text.) A TV commentator suggests he’d been perhaps digging through “burn bags” he’d been entrusted with, thst perhaps part of his tasks was to transport the bags to the burn facility.
What bothers me is he’d been sharing data with a bunch of people about his age for months, and nobody in the extended group thought to tell him or the authorities “Ummm… is this a good idea”?
(The news article for example showed a photo of intel long out of date, what areas of Ukraine soil would be frozen deep enough to allow tank traffic up to last month. Failry safe intel now.)
Really, MD? Mere seconds of googling brings an altogether different picture, and not from Puritan Conservative circles but plain old studies on brain development.
“Following neuronal proliferation, the brain rewires itself from the onset of puberty up until 24 years old, especially in the prefrontal cortex.”
" The prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to reach maturation, which explains why some adolescents exhibit behavioral immaturity. There are several executive functions of the human prefrontal cortex that remain under construction during adolescence, as illustrated in Figures 3 and and4.4. The fact that brain development is not complete until near the age of 25 years refers specifically to the development of the prefrontal cortex.[19]"
What consequences he should, or is likely to, face, are not questions for FQ, and in particular are not questions for this FQ thread. The topic at hand here is how he was able to get access to this information. His personal connections might have some relevance to how he was able to get clearance, but any effect they have on the consequences is a hijack.
I’m confused. You start by ridiculing the claim that a 21-year-old’s mental capacity is not yet fully developed, but then spend the rest of the post describing how insufficiently mature this man and the rest of his age cohort are.
The real question, IMHO, is why a million people, give or take, have access to the level of classified information that Teixeira had access to?
Why a 21 year old? Most people in military service are young. We issue full automatic weapons to 18 year olds and send them into combat if there’s a war on. You know those big aircraft carriers, the ones with airplanes flying on and off them and bombs and guns that are a major part of our navy? Average age of a crew member is 19.
Yeah, and none of those people need to know more than enough to understand the mission they’re on at that moment.
There are a lot of young people with a top secret clearance who need them because of the work they do for the military or government and the vast majority behave responsibility.
The problem when it comes to information is that ‘the vast majority’ isn’t good enough.
“Unless it is deploying under federal orders, the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s job is to protect the commonwealth. Communications of the leaders of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service and discussions among members of South Korea’s National Security Council on whether to sell ammunition that could end up in Ukraine have no obvious relevance to the suspect’s work, intelligence analysts say.”
Well, any ammunition sold by foreign powers to Ukraine means less ammunition available to defend the commonwealth from invasion, for instance by ravaging New Hampshireans. Huge relevance there.
I’d imagine the burn bags aren’t just bags that you can pull papers from, but more like locked bins that you can slide papers into via a slot, but can’t take anything out.
So maybe he just printed the stuff out and took it home with him. In that case procedures will certainly have to be tightened, and maybe some heads will roll.
I have had access to DoD computers. Not directly, I didn’t have clearance, so I’d be on the phone with some young person behind a terminal who would type anything I told them on the keyboard and they would read off whatever showed up on the screen. It is not a tight security system. That software now should be recording details of any changes to data but probably still doesn’t have an automatic record of who has seen it.
I don’t know if that’s quite right. The National Guard units, as Army/Air Force units, will have national security functions, in fact quite a bit of the services’ capabilities and missions have been transferred to be run by Guard/Reserve components who’d be keeping up with the work so they can more quickly switch to going full-on full-time if mobilized rather than spend weeks or month getting brought back to speed.