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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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He has no "background" to speak of, so background check is useless.

Certainly he has a background; he's 21 years old, not a newborn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Certainly he has a background; he's 21 years old, not a newborn.

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.

Texeira didn't have access to the US government's entire classified output either, of course.

He had much more access than his work needed him to, that's the point.

the audit trail would let them trace forward to find and question those who could have leaked them.

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.

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.

So in other words, he would pass a background check. As indeed we know he did.

He had much more access than his work needed him to, that's the point.

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.

So in other words, he would pass a background check. As indeed we know he did.

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.

How would you know?

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.