First there was Army soldier Chelsea Manning and after that intelligence contractors Edward Snowden and Reality Winner. All of them were twentysomethings charged with leaking highly classified documents they had access to as part of their government work and disclosing some of America’s most closely guarded secrets.
On Thursday, federal authorities arrested yet another suspected young leaker of top-secret U.S. intelligence — Jack Teixeira, a low-ranking member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Teixeira, 21, is charged with the alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information about the war in Ukraine and U.S. efforts to spy on its enemies and allies. The disclosures over the past week have exposed sensitive information about the U.S.-assisted war effort in Ukraine and the fragile war-time relationship between Washington and its allies.
Teixeira, an enlisted airman first class, is a member of the 102nd Intelligence Wing based in Cape Cod. Media reports say he posted the documents to an online group of young men and teenagers who came together over their shared love of weaponry, video games and racist online memes.
Why do these kinds of damaging intelligence leaks keep happening? And perhaps more importantly, what can the U.S. military and intelligence establishment do to prevent it from happening again?
Experts, including former U.S. intelligence officials, told USA TODAY that there are no easy fixes to the problem. That’s especially the case because of the vastness of the military and intelligence bureaucracy, which has literally millions of people – many of them independent contractors – with top-secret security clearances.
And in a post-9/11 world where government agencies are mandated to share whatever they can with whoever they can, no amount of “Insider Threat” monitoring is bound to catch all potential wrongdoers, they said in interviews.
“It’s a very complex system so there are no simple solutions,” said Glenn Gerstell, who served as the National Security Agency’s general counsel from 2015 to 2020. “But maybe all those millions of people don’t need access to everything the way we’ve got things going now.”
Similarities between leakers
According to military records, Teixeira joined the National Guard in 2019 and worked at Otis Air National Guard Base. His job title: cyber transport systems journeyman.
Teixeira is awaiting a court appearance Friday in the case and has not entered a plea. But military security experts and former U.S. intelligence officials told USA TODAY that there are many similarities between Teixeira and the other young “grunts,” or low-level operators and analysts who have been charged with stealing and leaking similarly classified documents.
Chelsea Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst in 2010 when she stole and leaked more than 700,000 classified documents, including battlefield reports on Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables. Manning, who said she provided the documents to Wikileaks as a form of protest, was eventually convicted and spent four years in prison before being pardoned by President Barack Obama.
In 2013, there was the case of 29-year-old Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency intelligence contractor in Hawaii who leaked a massive trove of classified documents that disclosed details about top-secret U.S. intelligence-gathering and surveillance programs. Snowden, who was charged under the Espionage Act, fled to Russia, where he lives today as a fugitive from U.S. justice. He has said he leaked the documents to protest U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
In 2017, 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, a linguist for an NSA intelligence contractor in Georgia, was arrested and charged with giving a media organization a classified U.S. government report about Russian hacking attempts that targeted U.S. voter registration information. She served about three years of her five-year prison sentence and was released in June 2021.
In the current case, authorities have not said whether Teixeira allegedly leaked any documents in order to make a political statement. A Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, declined to comment on case details at a press briefing, citing an ongoing Justice Department investigation.
But, Ryder, said, “This was a deliberate criminal act.”
Teixeira posted the documents to Discord, a social media and messaging platform popular among gamers, in an online group called Thug Shaker Central, according to the New York Times and Washington Post.
Members of the group did not identify Teixeira by name but referred to the person posting dozens of top-secret documents in recent months as OG, their de facto leader, the reports said. Some said he might have been doing it simply to share — and show off — the secrets he knew to a small circle of online friends who bonded over video games.
And according to the Times, “One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job.”
