Should Gen Z troops be trusted with the keys to the classified kingdom?
Jamie McIntyre
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The reaction of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to the news that a lowly enlisted National Guardsman enjoyed access to some of the nation’s most timely and classified wartime intelligence was typical of many military veterans.
“I am stunned that somebody at that level could have so much access,” Graham, a former JAG officer in the Air National Guard, said. “I was a captain and major. I would be surprised if I had that kind of information,” the senator told ABC News. “The system failed. This is a major failure.”
FBI ARRESTS JACK TEIXEIRA, AIR NATIONAL GUARDSMAN LINKED TO PENTAGON CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS LEAK
Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old cyber transport systems journeyman for the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was arrested on April 13 on charges of unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of highly classified national defense information.
His age immediately raised eyebrows.
“Like most people, I don’t understand why a 21-year-old National Guardsman had access to some of the most highly kept secrets in the United States. And in particular, finished products from the Joint Staff or finished products from the CIA operations center. Frankly I don’t know why the Massachusetts National Guard needs access to those things either,” former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Fox News.
Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said, “We entrust our members with a lot of responsibility at a very early age.”
Ryder added: “Think about a young platoon sergeant and the responsibility and trust that we put into those individuals to lead troops into combat.”
Teixeira was a very junior airman, an “E-3,” the third lowest enlisted rank. But Teixeira also had the computer skills to serve as the intelligence unit’s systems administrator, a job that came with a top-secret security clearance and access to a highly classified network called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.
“I understand the need for a clearance in order to work on the equipment,” Esper said. “He did IT work. There is a need to have a clearance for that, but there’s not a need for him to have access to the information on that system, let alone finished products.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said: “The vast majority of our military is young, and so it’s not exceptional that young people are doing important things in our military. That’s really not the issue.”
Austin added, “The issue is how you responsibly execute or carry out your duties and how you protect the information.”
According to a 2020 report from the Defense Department, just over one-half, 51.6%, of active-duty enlisted personnel are 25 or younger, with the next largest age group (26 to 30) making up 21% of the force. The average age for active-duty enlisted personnel is 27.
“It’s been kind of interesting to see people shocked that young people in the military are doing important jobs,” a senior defense official told the Washington Examiner. “I’ve seen a lot of reporting out there just going, ‘How could someone so young have access?’”
The official said: “It’s not about the age. It’s about the need to know, what your duties are. Anybody that has a TS/SCI [Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information] clearance is going to be trained. They’re going to have to sign a nondisclosure agreement acknowledging that any violation is a criminal offense.”
What’s more concerning than Teixeira’s age, say many observers, is that he seemed to have no trouble accessing hundreds of top secret documents without any “need to know” and was able to print and remove them from a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility unchallenged.
It is clear Teixeira’s superior officers were asleep at the switch, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said.
“How the heck was he able to take classified documents, it sounds like, out of a SCIF, take them home, take pictures of them, and put them on Discord?” Mace told Fox News. “It’s crazy to think that this was happening, and it’s clear that no one was watching where this young man was working and what he was doing.”
The Air Force has suspended the unit’s intelligence mission, and Austin has ordered a 45-day top-to-bottom examination of the Pentagon’s protocols for securing classified materials. This includes a “100% review” of personnel who have access to the highly classified JWICS network, along with tighter limits on distribution lists, physical and electronic access, printing privileges, and increased inspections of anyone who enters and exits a secure facility.
What the Pentagon won’t be doing is investigating how the leaked documents sat unnoticed in a private, invitation-only chat room on the social media platform Discord.
That’s a job for the FBI, said Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary.
“DOD does not spy on its own U.S. citizens, and we conduct ourselves in adherence with the law. This effort is solely about looking at how … classified information is accessed and who has access to that information,” she said.
“There’s certainly going to be a lot of military officials who have to be called to account,” said Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency. “This person took documents out over a period of months, on multiple occasions, had access to all sorts of information, not merely military briefings but briefings from the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”
“There’s been a lot of talk about the need to fix the classified system,” Gerstell said in an interview on CNN. “Most of that is focused on overclassification, the fact that we have too many classified documents. That’s absolutely true, but we also need to be focusing on the other end, which is the dissemination.”
Gerstell argues it’s time to update access controls to prevent people from “printing out something and walking out the door with it.”
“There’s technology that can help us with that,” he said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t invested in that technology.”
A white paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests it’s time for the intelligence community to employ “big data” to keep a new generation of tech-savvy military members on the straight and narrow.
“To stop a leak like this one would require a highly sophisticated form of internal monitoring based on establishing a robust pattern of normal and abnormal behaviors. These could be modeled on the same types of systems that identify credit card fraud — flagging activity that seems out of the ordinary for ‘normal’ patterns,” CSIS’s Emily Harding and Benjamin Jensen wrote.
“For example, if this recent leaker did not normally print intelligence products, then one day printed an unusual quantity, that would be flagged. If the most recent leaker focuses on cybersecurity for his normal job, but suddenly was accessing reports about China or Iran, that could be flagged as suspicious,” they suggested. “A question from a supervisor about unusual activity might be enough to dissuade the person from further activity.”
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“We are taking a close look at security protocols and procedures and assessing whether or not they need to be changed,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told White House reporters.
“Those protocols and practices, they exist for a reason, and they are never considered static. So if we need to implement changes, we will.”