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Massachusetts Air National Guard intelligence officer IDed as leader of group that spread all those classified Ukraine documents
By adamg on Thu, 04/13/2023 - 12:34pm
Update: Arrested at his North Dighton home.
The Washington Post and the New York Times report investigators looking at the leak of all those documents are increasingly looking at a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, who lead what the Times called a group of young men with "a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games" on the Discord network.
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Comments
Hoo boy
Between this guy and the one who harassed a tour bus last year the MA National Guard seems to be way overdue for a Coloneloscopy.
Folks who failed the psych
Folks who failed the psych exam for the Army/Marines.
make
examples out of every motherfucking last one of them. the last thing we need is more of this shit spreading in the military.
military fracture is the greatest threat we face and the sooner we can permanently flush the orange feces the better. any patriot should be aligned with this.
This guy doesn't realize just how F*cked he is
First off, why did this jackass have access to all of these materials, but second
When the POTUS has to frantically call allies and the top levels of the DOD and intelligence communities are scambling to limit the fallout of this breach, its pretty certain that this asshole will be in jail for the rest of his useful adult life
And to be honest, F*ck him. This leak is really, really bad
He is supposedly 21.
I mean really how would he? Why would any national guard person be in contact with this stuff?
Maybe he found it behind the
Maybe he found it behind the 'Vette in a cardboard box between the Turtle Wax and the tennis balls.
Clearances are common
It's common for military members to have clearances, depending on their jobs. Radio operators are automatically given Secret clearance, or they were when I was in. I dont know what this bozo's job is, but if it was in Intelligence, he'd almost certainly have a clearance higher than that. For soldiers with a clearance, violating secrecy like this is a Very Big Deal, and he's probably going into a military prison for a long time.
Edit: Other sources say he does work in Intelligence. Which is obviously not the same as being intelligent.
Update: Air Force unit in document leaks case loses intel mission"
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force is investigating how a lone airman could access and distribute possibly hundreds of highly classified documents, and in the meantime has taken away the intelligence mission from the unit where the leaks took place, Air Force leaders said Tuesday.
Maybe reserve judgement...
After all, not that the story is fishy as all hell, but we're not bring our 'A' game at all:
Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/security-docs-on-bidens-ireland-trip-foun...
"Authorities in Northern Ireland are investigating after secret security documents for President Joe Biden‘s visit were found lying in the street in Belfast."
I'm considering the possibility that the kid is a patsy.
Hey look!
It’s a False Flag Theory! Just in time. Where have you been? We were expecting you. Now all is well; the Idiot Army has arrived.
.
Yes
I saw this too online. He worked in "IT" so had clearance.
No one in National Guard
No one in National Guard intelligence ever saw "The Falcon and the Snowman"? It had Sean Penn in it, even! And a David Bowie theme song!
Whatever you do...
Don't follow "Falcon and Snowman" with Robert Downey Jr's, "Less Than Zero" on the same day. You may not fall asleep that night.
Even a very low-level intelligence analyst like
this kid would likely have access to JWICS, the system DoD uses to house top secret and sensitive/compartmented information.
But as someone else noted, yeah, he is well and truly fucked. Reality Winner got five-plus years for leaking one document to the press. This idiot leaked hundreds of documents to a chat group with members all over the world.
This isn't even the troubling part
It takes a holy fuckton of effort to *not know* about this shithead's extracurricular activities.
This fish rots from the head and a whole load of senior heads need to head for the compost bin if not the brig.
Well, no
The most troubling part is the careless disclosure of sensitive intelligence, with an NCO having access to said intel right up there.
Not sure this is true. There are a lot of
low-level defense intelligence analysts in their early 20s who have top secret clearance. If this kid was merely an IT staffer and not an analyst, then there has to be a revisit of policies around that role's access to classified documents.
The issue of managing who gets access to sensitive data, at what level, for how long, and for what purpose is a challenge even for large private enterprises, which is about the scale of the 100,000-strong Air National Guard. It's common for cybercriminals and hostile intelligence agencies to try to bribe insiders to simplify breaches, but this doesn't look like that: it appears he was just trying to impress his online friends with "the real shit".
The specter of people taking stuff home from work and then leaving the organization keeps a lot of CISO types awake at night: you want control and visibility of everything that moves off of systems outside your direct control, but sometimes that ability helps people's productivity, so maybe you only set alerts for giant data transfers, like someone copying an entire hard drive via a USB port. It's a tricky balance.
It's an egregious fuckup for a branch of the US military, but not entirely surprising. It's too early to tell how expensive a national security lesson in lax data loss prevention this is -- politically, it will surely be used to beat up Biden -- but at the very least, it's never great for your alliances to have it publicly disclosed that you've been spying on your friends, too.
As others have noted, this incident highlights another (age-old) issue of right-wing extremism and bigotry in the military that needs to be addressed now more than ever: this callow hick appears to be a naked racist and anti-Semite. Growing up not far from North Dighton, I knew tons of teens like him. I suspect this problem is thornier to tackle than tightening up the security of classified intelligence.
Question
Did the security breaches undertaken by Reality Winner, Edward Snowden, and Bradley/Chelsea Manning highlight issues with sensitive intelligence? Yes, and now Jack Teixeira's body of work will add to things. Everything else is just noise.
But the substance of the disclosures
matters, too. It's just less clear at the moment how damaging the current disclosures were.
It's not just the fact that stuff was leaked, but what was leaked, too.
So all a game?
The bizarre telling of the story on the WP has me half believing that 4chan is at it again and is playing a prank on the press with some documents they managed to get a hold of.
Sharpen your Occam's Razor. We don't know all
the facts at this point, but I've seen enough to discount harebrained conspiracy theories.
Sounds reasonable
OK, this just broke, so let me get this straight. A 21 year old airman first class had access to extremely sensitive national security secrets that appear to be totally not compartmented and cover a wide range of subjects (foreign elections, JDAM problems, Egyptian deliveries of arms to Russia, etc) and posted them to his online gamer buddies.
Sounds reasonable.
Jason Bourne, call the office. Now.
Gonna get rusty
I don't think you get a lot of video game time where young Mr. Teixeira is going. Might find some thug shakers, though.
Why anyone would join the service in order to so comprehensively shit his own bed, I do not understand.
Treason
Where he's going might not even be a terrestrial place.
This is absolute treason.
Can't be treason
because we aren't at war with Russia.
But he's still in big trouble.
Not treason, espionage
He will be charged under the Espionage Act, like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
He is likely facing a near-life term of
imprisonment. I'd call it headshaking to think how gobsmackingly stupid this kid is, but I know a lot of Trumpies.
Headline could use an update
He's not an intelligence officer, just a young Airman first class, which is below NCO level.
I'm kind of surprised this doesn't happen more often with people that young abusing access to classified info. As a tech, he would wind up working in close proximity to all kinds of stuff. I had a security clearance as an Aviation Electrician's Mate when I was the same rank (E-3), just so I could be trusted to work alone on aircraft that had classified equipment installed. I didn't even maintain the secret stuff, but I was normally working around it with no supervision as part of my regular duties.
They said he was an IT and had access to systems.
But it also said that things that he posted were obviously folded pieces of paper that were later scanned. Those two don't add up.
He accessed stuff
And then printed it out to show his racist, antisemitic shit-posting pals. Allegedly.
IT guys aren't big on paper.
And I assume he knows how to share a digital file. (shrug emoji)
He initially hand-copied some of the
documents he'd printed out, shared them that way. Read the news.
I know they said he printed them out. Which is not something
a Gen Z IT guy would typically do. Which is my point.
He did it for gamer cred...
As hard as it is to believe, he was motivated to commit this act to impress his gamer friends. Pretty dumb way to ruin your life. Even if he does no prison time after his general court martial ,he's going to have a hard time getting a job with a Dishonorable discharge listed on his DD214,
Even the cops on a Tactical Airforce Base have Top Secret clearance. Yes there is a comprehensive background check.
Loving the Two Minutes' Hate here.
First of all, the headline is wrong. The hapless Teixeira is not an "officer," he's a low-ranking enlisted man.
Neither is he an "intelligence officer," as he was trained in network and communications administration rather than intelligence. His job gave him access to classified systems and spaces at Otis. Not SuperSpy, but Help Desk.
There's nothing to indicate any motive for this other than wishing to impress his online bros in his Discord group. He was dumb enough not to consider further leaks and how it all could be traced back to him. So another dumb kid, 17 years old, leaked them further. I wouldn't be surprised if they try to hammer him, too.
Of course many here have him lumped in with Nazis and of course Evil himself, Trump. That's enough to earn him a slow death by torture, I guess. Any chance he might get a big commutation of sentence like Manning did? On the surface, similar cases of young confused guys. If anything, Manning did more damage as his leaks had names of US collaborators and informants in them.
Years of pieties and BS in schools and culture have created a climate where young males are attracted to the counterculture that accepts them - the ironic racist shitposting one. So we have Andrew Tate and 4chan. Action/reaction works in culture and politics too.
Personally, whatever the motive, I like these periodic leaks of US fuckery, a la Manning and Snowden. Helps to keep the foolish "national security" establishment on edge and forces them to rethink things. US stopped being the unambiguously good guys a long time ago.
Compassion, hate, etc.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years and did 7. That seems appropriate. One can feel compassion for a screwed-up person trying desperately to be significant, and still think that there must be very serious consequences for treating valuable information that has been entrusted to you as your own possession, with which you can do as you wish. Teixeira's situation is pathetic, in the original sense of pitiable. I think he had a bad case of imposter's syndrome; a twenty-one-year-old who set himself up as leader of a troop of impressionable boys, who persuaded them that he really was the hard man that they were pretending to be, but which he was also only pretending to be. He impressed them because he was an actual soldier, with real training with guns and stuff. However an airman doing IT work in the Guard is not exactly a Navy Seal, and he knew that, and probably felt had to keep piling on new evidence of his importance. I can despise him for that and still pity him. He's thrown away his life for the most negligible reward imaginable, for the admiration of a few boys who have probably already started to see him for what he is.
Edit: I should not have called it imposter’s syndrome, because he really was an imposter.
You are right.
People who advocate long harsh punishments usually haven't even visited a maximum security prison, let alone spent a week in one. The idea of years, or life in one can't be empathized by them.
But rules are rules, and there are secrets which if revealed actually would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to the USA, as the standard says.
So he should get some time. Seven years might be too little. I'd say ten years, given his youth and apparent lack of profit or subversive motive.
In the end, both Manning and Teixeira informed Americans about lies their government was telling them and truths they were hiding. Shouldn't Americans know that US troops are in Ukraine? Manning revealed the brutal attack helicopter video. If she stopped there, she'd be a hero, but went on to dump a lot of secret diplomatic cables which would only make diplomacy more difficult by naming names.
Teixeira isn't some whistleblowing hero
Though I don't think that you are trying to say so either, it's just your last paragraph lumps him in with someone who arguably had good intentions in leaking secrets.
Teixeira shared secret documents with a private group of online pals, seemingly for the attention they would throw at him as a result. That's a dangerous motivation, because it's hard to watch for.
This was already known. It was formally addressed in a press briefing by the Pentagon in early November (1) and reported by the press as early as last May (2).
(1) https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3206756/pent...
(2) https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/politics/us-embassy-kyiv-special-operatio...
Take your pick, then
Like the suspicion that Egypt, which receives $1 billion plus of "security assistance" every year, might be selling rockets to Russia. Or that the UAE, an "ally" might do the same.
Or that the war might not be going as well as Ukraine hoped.
Ukraine "hoped" this war
Ukraine "hoped" this war wouldn't happen at all. Are you one of those big-brains who thinks Ukraine started it?
As for Egypt, the UAE, and all the rest that's allegedly in there, I'd guess most intelligence agencies on the planet already had come to similar conclusions. This isn't world-shaking stuff.
Nothing is simple
For Egypt, new reporting from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/17/russia-ukrai...
So, American diplomacy was at work out of the public view, as it often is most effective to pressure in private rather than in public.
As for how the war is going, it's a war, they are all bad. You don't need these leaks to tell you that the fighting is brutal and that Russia has fortified their unlawfully taken positions on Ukrainian soil.
Take your pick, then
Like the suspicion that Egypt, which receives $1 billion plus of "security assistance" every year, might be selling rockets to Russia. Or that the UAE, an "ally" might do the same.
Or that the war might not be going as well as Ukraine hoped.
An airman, not a soldier,
An airman, not a soldier, huge difference. You know not of what you speak.