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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Following the Texeira leak, I have a question which I do not see covered at all in any of the press. Has been there any investigation started into the security structure failures that led to these leaks? It is obvious that it is a systemic failure - a glorified janitor shouldn't have an access to top secret documents, and most of these documents didn't have much business to be on National Guard airbase anyway, they don't have anything to do with whatever Air Force is supposed to be dealing with. Somebody is responsible for the security on Otis Air National Guard Base - and that somebody screwed up big time. Do we know about anybody being places on leave, suspended, demoted, whatever it is? What is the usual procedure in the Army when something like this happens? How much consequences could be expected to people responsible for preventing such things from happening?

My understanding is that he was low-level IT for classified networks, specifically JWICS.. That would mean access to terminals which can pull down such documents rather than actual, physical copies.

In a civilian installation, there are lots of rules about access control for classified networks. I would expect most of them to hold even though the airbase is already an elevated environment. If there was supposed to be a buddy system, no one left alone with a terminal, then either there was an accomplice or said system wasn't enforced. If there were record reviews which should have caught his activity, someone could take flak for that. Other than that, hard to say if anyone higher up the chain gets blame. The most likely outcome is close scrutiny and the addition of half a dozen new procedures to learn.

The pictures seem to show printed documents in a rather large format -- I'm sure you could find this kind of printer at a secure intelligence location, but I should think that there'd be some kind of special controls around it?

My work laptop won't even take a USB stick -- how else is he getting the documents out? Leaving aside the fact that photographic devices should also be controlled in such places, the images I saw didn't really look like phone snaps blown up a Walgreens -- they take up a big chunk of his kitchen table!

The pictures seem to show printed documents in a rather large format -- I'm sure you could find this kind of printer at a secure intelligence location, but I should think that there'd be some kind of special controls around it?

Certainly an audit trail, but it appears he made no attempt to cover his tracks anyway. Probably not any controls to prevent people from using it... and certainly none that would keep the IT guy out.