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How Pentagon leak suspect’s violent words escaped notice

Prosecutors say Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira is behind the largest leak of U.S. intelligence in decades. He also allegedly made racist threats in high school, and recently said online that he favored “culling the weak minded.”

How did someone with that kind of profile have access to so much sensitive data?

Why We Wrote This

There are 2.8 million people with U.S. security clearances. Some of them exhibit online behavior that should disqualify them from access to secrets – and intelligence agencies are studying better ways of identifying those people.

One problem is the sheer amount of classified information, which necessitates a larger number of people with security clearances – around 2.8 million.

And all those secrets are distributed widely among the many different parts of the U.S. intelligence community. That’s a practice begun after 9/11, when lack of such sharing was identified as a partial reason the government failed to anticipate the attacks.

As an IT employee, Mr. Teixeira had a clearance in case he saw secrets while working. But he had no “need to know” qualifying him to search and print out classified archives.

One conclusion: The U.S. needs a better way of enforcing the need-to-know standard for wide access.

“Any system that doesn’t detect some of these red flags is, by definition, flawed,” says Michael Allen, who worked in President George W. Bush’s National Security Council.

In March 2018, a high school junior in North Dighton, Massachusetts, was suspended after a classmate allegedly heard him discussing guns, Molotov cocktails, and racist threats. 

To those who knew him online, this wouldn’t have been a surprise. The student – Jack Teixeira – was a gun-loving, edgy teenage gamer. The servers he frequented in the years to come included members who were obsessed with the military and posted Nazi memes.

But that didn’t prevent Mr. Teixeira, the next year, from getting an IT job with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Neither, in 2021, did it stop him from getting a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance – the highest level the government awards.

Why We Wrote This

There are 2.8 million people with U.S. security clearances. Some of them exhibit online behavior that should disqualify them from access to secrets – and intelligence agencies are studying better ways of identifying those people.

Now Mr. Teixeira stands accused of abusing his position, and then some. Last month, he was arrested and charged with being the perpetrator of the largest leak of U.S. intelligence in a decade. Since last October, he has allegedly posted hundreds of highly classified national security documents on Discord, a popular gaming site.

The Discord leaks have presented a list of questions for the American intelligence community – about how someone in such a niche outfit could have access to some of the nation’s most furtive secrets and why the leak took so long to spot. But as more details of Mr. Teixeira’s past come out, former intelligence officials are also starting to wonder how he got a clearance at all – and how he even made it into the military. 

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