Teixeira case and the leaky buckets of US intelligence
‘There’s a Hole in the Bucket” is a wonderful old children’s song, a dialogue between Henry and Liza about fixing a leaky bucket and all of Henry’s excuses for just not being able to get that done, because, well, it’s complicated. Today our nation’s intelligence system is a collection of leaky buckets — the case of 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who stands accused of posting classified military secrets online, the latest of several high-profile US intelligence leaks over the last decade.
And, yes, it’s complicated — complicated by a military recruitment system that seeks to attract young people via the same online sites that provide an extremely handy way to disseminate classified information; by an overutilized security classification system; and by a post-9/11 system that has encouraged interagency information sharing.
There’s also the simple fact that the more secrets the nation has, the more people can’t do their jobs without a security clearance. Today some 3 million people have security clearances and at least 1.2 million of them have top-secret clearances.
An earlier round of national soul-searching about the handling of classified documents began after the FBI raid on the Mar-a-Lago residence of former president Donald Trump turned up a cache of top-secret papers. That followed smaller stacks of similar papers at the home and a former private office of President Biden and at the home of former vice president Mike Pence.
But the classified documents Teixeira is accused of amassing weren’t just in some storage room. Hundreds of them have already been posted on the web for all the world to see — documents revealing operational information about the conduct of the war in Ukraine, Egypt’s “secret” plan to provide rockets to Russia, and the embarrassing but hardly surprising fact that the US spies on its allies like Israel and South Korea as well as its enemies.
And there may be more. In an affidavit filed in federal court, FBI investigators indicated that additional “highly sensitive documents containing US national defense information” are likely to be found at either of the two Dighton residences used by Teixeira and that such information is believed to be stored in an “unsecured manner.”
And to be clear, there’s no indication whatsoever that Teixeira had any ideological reason for leaking or that he was a whistleblower on any kind of government wrongdoing. His motive, apparently, is that he wanted to impress his friends.
Teixeira, a computer and communications specialist stationed at Otis Air Force Base, received his top-secret clearance in 2021, according to prosecutors. To those who wonder how a kid who might still have to ask permission to borrow the family car gets a top-secret clearance, well, keep in mind, two-thirds of US military personnel are under the age of 30 and most of those are under age 25.
At about the same time he got his security clearance, Teixeira was part of a group of gamers who gathered to chat online on Discord. It’s the same server the Defense Department uses to attract Gen Z recruits and to give some 17,000 youthful service members a place to chat — about guns and gaming.
It would be the same site eventually used to disseminate hundreds of classified documents beginning in late February — long after they originally appeared on a more private server, Thug Shaker Central, where FBI investigators say Teixeira began sharing them. By early April some of the documents related to the war in Ukraine were posted on Russian channels on the messaging service Telegram and soon after made it to Twitter.
“One of the issues here is whether this involved the role of this individual or if this was an access issue,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor who has handled a number of high-profile “leak” cases. “If it’s [a crime] of an individual nature, then no matter how good your [vetting] process is, things will happen.”
He cited the cases of Generals James Cartwright, who leaked classified information to the press about Iran’s nuclear program, and David Petraeus, who shared classified information with his biographer, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
“They exercised bad judgment,” he added.
By all accounts Teixeira, who initially offered up summaries of the classified material to his online buddies, allegedly upped the ante when those failed to impress the group. He then began to share original documents, investigators say, and those eventually gained a far wider audience.
And while the “central issue of overclassification of material has been an issue for “a long time,” Van Grack added, “it isn’t the issue here.” Clearly the material in question should indeed be classified. But “it might be an access issue,” he added.
There’s another reason so many have access. More than two decades ago, the 9/11 terror attacks laid bare the issue of intelligence silos where one agency simply didn’t share valuable information with another, and where each had a piece of the growing terrorism puzzle, but no one had the full picture.
Post-9/11 policies led to more intelligence sharing — and quite possibly “oversharing,” as Van Grack put it.
At the same time, the intelligence system continued to slap a “classified” label on far too many documents, a practice which Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, said in January, “negatively impacts national security.”
Alissa Starzak, acting chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee established by Congress, spoke one simple truth:
“I think we can do a better job protecting secrets if we have a smaller number of things that are secret.”
So fewer secrets, a serious reevaluation of who needs access to them, and a far more serious monitoring of the online netherworld where Russian operatives are clearly outpacing any US efforts would be a good place to start fixing those leaky buckets. And, yes, it’s going to be complicated.