So how does this work with the guard and their jobs? Do they rotate out a couple of times a year to do security work for the regular AF? On weekends once a month, as is considered normal for a guard unit along with an extended tour once a year? Are they called up by some special statue (Homeland Security?) into extended active duty due to his classification?
Becasue most people think of guardsmen as part timers, and having a part timer get ahold of that much Top Secert information would seem hard to do.
To answer my own question is that its reported that he has been on Federal orders since October 1st, before then he was just doing normal guard duty. And given the information reported he used his own name and address in his Discord gaming account. So he appears to be just some young guy trying to impress other young guys with what he knows and he caught the attention of the bad guys.
Didn’t his parents teach him if you play with fire and you might get burned?
In my, personal, experience I’d say that most people are crazy on the hormones from about 13 to 25.
It looks like both Reality Winner and Edward Snowden were past that border but I suspect that Texeira isn’t the only one talking about national secrets with his friends - just one of the more egregious - that we’re largely unaware of most leaks that occur, and that there’d be a pretty significant drop in total leaked material if you instituted an age limit on security clearances.
People used to be married, with kids, and holding down a job at 21. (some still do so today) Heck, well before 25 a person is already committed to hundreds of thousands in student debt. He’s one of many at that age with equal responsibilities, he just happened to be the unreliable one. Just because one fool is immature does not prove the rule. As for his cohort, they are already selected for “let’s spend our spare time playing vidoegames” and some may be much younger, given that. Plus, perhaps they didn’t take him seriously - did they think he took available news and print “top secret” on it, much like adolescents who “are Navy Seals and work for the CIA” in any such chat room?
The random nature of the documents seems to indicate he got ahold of them opportunistically. Some of the documents I see in a hard to read photo in the news, suggest these look like more detailed than screen prints and bigger than 8.5x11 paper (or else your typical older officer needs a magnifying glass…) I think that’s why the TV commentators suggested burn bags - these appear to be print-outs for meetings. If he was accessing supposedly sealed document containers, and nobody noticed for months, that’s another cause for concern about processes.
I don’t see how that is indicative of the ability to be entrusted with national security secrets
There is no assumption that all 21 year olds are untrustworthy. But if say 1% of 25 year olds cannot be trusted with state secrets, whereas, say 0.1% of 30+ year olds cannot be trusted with state secrets, then it makes sense to have an age limit.
Besides the need-to-know requirements mentioned above, do state secrets come in “scope of damage if they leaked” categories?
Someone entrusted with the secret about which village in Afghanistan they’re about to raid tomorrow: If this leaks, there will be some damage, but not that big
Someone entrusted with the identity of a spy: If this leaks, the spy may be killed, but there will be no long term damage to US foreign policy
Someone entrusted with secrets indicating the US knows Mossad’s secrets: If this leaks, this is very damaging
Someone entrusted with secrets indicating the US knows Putin’s inner-circle secrets: If this leaks, this is super damaging
Is there a document classification that limits who can view it to a handful of people?
Yes. That is the point of the different classification levels (Confidential, Secret, Top Secret).
“Need to know” implicitly limits who is permitted to view any piece of classified material. There are explicit categories such as Secure Compartmentalized Information (SCI) and Special Access Program (SAP) that provide additional hoops to jump through to ensure the audience is limited to those with a need to know.
You cannot legally view anything that you don’t have a “need to know”. Even if you have a Top Secret/SCI clearance you can get it trouble for accessing a Confidential (the lowest classification level) document that you don’t need to access.
I’m not sure if this was addressed yet in this thread, but a CNN article says that he was afraid he might get caught transcribing the documents, so he took them home where he photographed them.
How are security protocols so lax that someone can take these documents home? Isn’t everyone checked as they leave the base?
I’m a retired computer programmer for a civilian U.S. government agency, and I made sure that there was a record of every time an employee viewed (or, of course, changed) information about one of our clients. I can’t even remember being told to do this — it seemed obviously needed so if something went wrong, we could know who might have been working with whom to plan it.
If you show secret information to many thousands of people, of course some will prove untrustworthy. If they all get the same secret info, regardless of their specific duty, I don’t believe you can control that.
As already mentioned, most of the information seemed more appropriate for briefings of the highest level officials. And a lot sounds like what I might read in the New York Times and Washington Post except for the unnecessary mention of sourcing. I’d hesitate to let even the President know where we got our info on Russian military plans from.
If you give someone a job where they are supposed to check something hundreds or thousands of times, and every time the result of the check is — no action necessary — I think they are going to stop doing the check carefully. An exception could be a wartime picket duty where you are seriously afraid that missing something would result in death. But in this kind of case, it must be very hard to prevent the checks from becoming lax. Undoubtedly, these questions are given a lot of thought by security staff. But I’d put most of the emphasis on reducing the number of secrets and the number who have access to each of them.
Experience seems to show that older people are the problem and the leakers, based on past espionage incidents. What’s disturbing is this guy seems to have been boasting rather than being motivated by principles and/or a failure of the organization to follow the law, like Snowden or Winner or Manning.
Career is like a filer system. the longer it goes on, the better, the finer filtering is - but sometimes the lumps get through.
The photos seem to suggest the papers were folded at least in quarters, so nobody was checking his pockets?
There’s another category - one item was “soil frozen to allow tank maneuvering in March” which is kind of irrelevant now, and probably came from the Ukrainian meteorology agency. Something you don’t want the other side to know that you know specifically at the time, but after, who cares?
If you’re more likely to come into contact with higher importance materials as you become older but, likewise, you’re less likely to leak secret materials as you become older, then you’re looking at a sort of diamond shape of danger. Anything news worthy would fall in that zone. Anything to the left, while leaked prolifically, isn’t very notable. Anything to the right is unlikely to be leaked at all. In that middle spot, you still have some chance of leaks and the value of those leaks are newsworthy.
The TSA checks hundreds of thousands of people per day, so this is not an insurmountable problem. Sure, they’re not the best, but better than nothing .
Even lax checks are better than no checks.
In the Reddit thread linked above, someone said they could theoretically have copied TB of data and walked out with no problem.
I think putting all our trust in the Top Secret vetting process, without additional on-the-spot checks, is super naive.