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Who has been through the background check process and gotten a security clearance. Yes, you do, if by "zero supervision" you mean they can do things without someone looking over their shoulder all the time; obviously they have a boss. When you got your first professional job, did you not get access to all sorts of company confidential documents right away? You probably had to, because your job required working with those documents. It's the same for classified materials, except there's that extra background check process and rather more severe penalties for leaking.
Who said the access wasn't audited? Apparently this guy did nothing to cover his tracks. But also, who would be looking at the audit trail? People in classified environments aren't working in a panopticon with their superiors suspecting them all the time. The audit trail is useful after the fact once it's known the documents had been leaked.
He has no "background" to speak of, so background check is useless. Justifying the failure by "but look, here's the checklist we designed, and all the checks are checked! We even used the fully approved pen and the font is in full accordance with regulations!" is a very clear example of turning it into a cargo cult.
Nope, I did not. I now have 30 years experience and an impressive sounding title, and I still don't have access to a lot of company documents or permissions, and I am glad I do not.
Texeira's job did not require working with those documents. That's the point. Nothing in Texeira's job required knowing how the Ukrainian counter-offensive preparations are going and what Russians think about it. In fact, I don't think I'd be too wrong if I assume there probably no more than one or two persons on that whole base, and maybe none, who needed to know anything about that.
It's obvious from the fact that they didn't know where it came from and for how long it was allowed to continue unchecked. If there were audit, it'd discover who accessed those docs and the general pattern of accessing docs he has no business accessing very quickly.
They should be. Somehow the rest of us living in a panopticon gets much less pushback than people working with "top secret" documents being supervised while reviewing those documents. If anybody deserved the panopticon, it's them.
And yet, that's not how Texeira has been found out - instead, open-source researchers and journalists talking to his game buddies got to the target first.
Evidently,
TANGMANG disagreed before this incident. The reason why may be left to raw speculation, but it seems prosaic to say that theTenneseeMassachusetts Air National Guard (or the organization above it) had its reasons for having access to this information.Of course if somebody in the government does something we don't understand, it always because they have their ineffable ways, which can not be understood by mere mortals. Never attribute to inefficiency and rigidity of humongous bureaucracy what you could attribute to ineffability and unknowable reasons.
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Certainly he has a background; he's 21 years old, not a newborn.
Seems very strange. At every company I've worked at I had access to a whole bunch of confidential material. Not all of it, naturally, but a good chunk. Texeira didn't have access to the US government's entire classified output either, of course.
Yes, that's because he was incredibly sloppy. Had he successfully leaked the documents without it being easy to find him by tracing the leaks back to him, the audit trail would let them trace forward to find and question those who could have leaked them.
He's not Brett Kavanaugh, so what he did in high school hardly matters. If he did something that does matter, like having a criminal record, he probably wouldn't be nowhere near that position anyway, in fact probably wouldn't be in the National Guard to begin with.
He had much more access than his work needed him to, that's the point.
You're saying like existence of that trail is an established fact, but it's not. I strongly suspect it in fact does not exist.
So in other words, he would pass a background check. As indeed we know he did.
How would you know? In general, of course, it's true; while ideally everyone has exactly has much access as they need and not a document more, in fact that's not practical and if you work on various large projects you likely have access to other parts of those projects that you don't strictly need. But I don't see how you would know that Teixeira didn't need access to those documents as part of his work, since it's very unlikely you have a full description of his duties.
You keep saying it as if it means something. That's a cargo cult behavior - insisting that if some formal criteria is satisfied, then the actual problem, which this formal criteria was supposed to answer (but does not) is actually solved, by virtue of satisfying the formalities, and the evidence that it is very much not solved is just noise, as long as we look back at the formal criteria, all is fine.
I can't know for sure, but it seems highly implausible that anybody - let alone a low-level 21 year old recruit - could have a job that required him to access this breadth and depth of information. Of course, theoretically it is possible that this Air National Guard airbase is exactly the place where Ukrainian counter-offensive strategy is forged, despite National Guard and US Air Force having nothing to do with it, and this is exactly the place where also intelligence information about Israel and South Korea is concentrated, again for some reason as this has nothing to do with National Guard or Air Force, and at the same place the reports about intelligence collected from Russians is sent, and also this is the place which is responsible to reacting to hacker attacks on Canadian energy infrastructure - and in the center of all this sits the master spy, the indispensable man, the nerve center of US intelligence community - 21-year-old super-mega-ultra-agent Texeira, which rules all this spying kingdom. I leave it to you to decide what is more plausible - this scenario or that security compartmentalization and audit practices in US Army are bad, and you are just arguing for the sake of arguing.
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