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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?
A janitor working in a top secret facility naturally has access to top secret documents, though as I understand it sometimes a janitor would have a lower-level clearance and an escort and do work at a time when such documents are supposed to be put away. But Texeira was not a custodian in the sense of "janitor;" he was a "custodian of classified documents". That means he was responsible for keeping track of the combinations of the safes holding the classified documents and changing them as required. Such a person obviously has access to the classified information.
As for why the documents were at a National Guard airbase, apparently there was some relevant expertise there. Seems weird to me too, but it's not definitely wrong.
Unfortunately, to some degree, that was Texeira.
Somebody appointed him to that position. Somebody supervised him. It's not like US Air Force command structure is Biden - Charles Q. Brown Jr. (had to look him up) - Texeira. There's probably some layers in between, and people in those layers have direct responsibility for hiring and supervising their subordinates. Which means, whoever led to the situation where Texeira had full and unsupervised access to secret documents he had no business accessing - failed at their duty. What I am interested in is who these people were and did they suffer (or will suffer) any consequences, commensurate with the degree of their failure.
Looks like he was actually a "Cyber Transport Systems journeyman"; not sure where I read he was the custodian of (physical) documents but that seems to have been wrong. He had undergone a background investigation and gotten a Top Secret clearance, and his job would have lead to full and, yes, unsupervised access to documents. He was supposed to be trustworthy enough to have such access; this is what the background investigation is supposed to determine. Clearly he wasn't, but I'm not sure why you think it was somehow obvious before the fact that he wasn't.
You don't just give 21 yo who you've just hired recently (obviously, you couldn't have hired him while he's in high school) the keys to the castle with zero supervision. No matter if he looks super trustworthy, it is not how it should work. In fact, I see no reason why non-audited access to the documents should be given to anyone, and why anyone should be accessing this level of documents without leaving the audit trail and probably raising some alerts as to why these documents are accessed by a person who has no tasks assigned related to these documents. Like, you don't have to initiate full-scale FBI investigation immediately, but if his supervisor got an alert that the guy who is supposed to be a technician is accessing the docs about Ukraine and Israel and what not, which he has no business with - and if he's a competent manager - he'd call him and ask him what is going on, and all this charade may have not gotten out of hand as it did.
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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