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When “top secret” isn’t so secret

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WASHINGTON – Why would a 21-year-old National Guardsman take a stand with access to top secret documents?

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The dramatic arrest on Thursday Jack TeixeiraAn airman with a Massachusetts Air National Guard intelligence unit who federal authorities say is linked to a leak of reams of classified documents exposes the sheer volume of people authorized to view a variety of national security documents that the government rank as top secret.

Police block a road some distance from the home of Jack Teixeira, which investigators believe is linked to a leak of classified US intelligence documents, in North Dighton, Massachusetts.  (Alex Gagne/The New York Times)

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Police block a road some distance from the home of Jack Teixeira, which investigators believe is linked to a leak of classified US intelligence documents, in North Dighton, Massachusetts. (Alex Gagne/The New York Times)

From National Guardsmen at bases in Massachusetts to generals at NATO headquarters in Brussels to American bureaucrats around the world, the “Top Secret” clearance grants its bearers an extraordinary level of access.

With it, they can see secure sites of the pentagon and other intelligence services, daily intelligence briefings, situation maps, and detailed analyzes of the state of the world as seen through the eyes of the intelligence community. intelligence WE.

Members of the US military with top secret clearance include nearly all of the above 600 generals of the different services.

But that level of clearance also extends to some of his military aides, many colonels working at the Pentagon, Navy ship captains, a wide range of junior officers, and even, in the obvious case of Teixeira, to conscripts working in intelligence units.

tens of thousands

Pentagon officials say the number of people with this type of access is in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.

And just below them, those with “secret” clearance include nearly everyone else who works for the Pentagon or other national security agencies.

The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.  (Haiyun Jiang/New York Times)

The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. (Haiyun Jiang/New York Times)

There are military contractors and even think tank analysts who have some level of security clearance.

The Pentagon is likely to face the aftermath of leaking dozens of pages of sensitive material for months as Russian military planners study soon completely Leaked files lead to their own compromised agencies.

But the case raises broader questions about whether the term “top secret” is really secret and whether national security agencies have allowed their sensitive material to go Too far.

“Clearly too many people have access to too much top-secret information” that they don’t need to know, said Evelyn Farkas, senior Department of Defense officer for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration.

On Thursday, the Pentagon was rattled by the possibility that the leaker was far from the top echelons of military intelligence and sensitive national security data.

Instead of finding the leaker at the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where generals and high-ranking officers gathered many of the documents that had been posted on a small online game chat group called Thug Shaker Central, officials they are found breaking into Teixeira’s house.

“Each of us signs a confidentiality agreement, anyone with a security clearance,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said at a news conference.

“So everything points to, again, that it’s a criminal act“.

Teixeira’s arrest, Farkas said, serves as a reminder of what awaits those who misuse classified information.

“They will throw everything at him,” he said, “and that will make it more important for the government to take action against others who think they are immune because of their high office.”

A person convicted of such a leak could face lengthy prison sentences, according to authorities.

Teixeira was arrested under the espionage lawe, whose infractions result in a penalty of hup to 10 years’ imprisonment per charge.

Reality Winner, a former Air Force aviator and contractor for the National Security Agency, convicted of leaking a classified document to the media, was sentenced to five years and three months in prison.

A Navy engineer, Jonathan Toebbe, who unsuccessfully tried to sell secrets classified below “confidential” to a foreign country, was sentenced last year to 19 years in prison.

His wife, Diana Toebbe received nearly 22 years in prison.

Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that “this is a serious breach of security that cannot be repeated.”

“Anyone with a security clearance who betrays their country by knowingly manipulating classified documents or revealing classified material must be held accountable.”

Some military officials have defended the practice of granting security clearances to service members regardless of their age; if someone is old enough to die for their country, he is old enough to trust his secrets, they argued.

“When you join the military, depending on your position, you may need a security clearance,” Ryder said.

“And if you work in the intelligence community and need a security clearance, you will go through the appropriate scrutiny. We hold our members a great deal of responsibility to a very young age”.

National security officials said on Thursday the incident highlighted weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the authorization process despite the changes brought about by the case. Edward Snowdena former US intelligence contractor who became one of the world’s highest-profile fugitives after revealing mass surveillance techniques to newspapers.

“Clearly these reforms have not been effective enough,” said Javed Ali, a former senior US counterterrorism official who served in intelligence at the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Department of Homeland Security.

For example, top-secret reports are kept on government computers located in secure work zones known as SCIFs. (Sensitive compartmentalized information structures), in which it is not allowed to introduce electronic devices that can be used to take photographs or video or audio recordings.

Visitors to a number of Pentagon offices are required to leave their cell phones, laptops, and anything else that can be used to record or take photos in the lobby lockers.

To limit the leaks of information after the Snowden case, senior officials have established rules limit capacity people to access SCIF material electronically.

“Snowden’s problem was to keep people from electronically diverting classified material,” Ali said.

“This person went in the opposite direction, probably due to post-Snowden measures.”

In this case, the documents appear to have beenor printed and removed from classified facilities, officials said, though not much is yet known about how the materials ended up in the chat group.

It was unclear on Thursday what level of clearance Teixeira had.

But he was stationed with the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing, and may have had a top-secret clearance, a defense official said Thursday.

“There is the obvious question of why someone from a relatively low and rather obscure corner of the military, namely the Massachusetts Air National Guard, could have access not only to some of the nation’s top secrets, but to such an extraordinary set of them, that they could have nothing to do with his work,” said Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel of the National Security Agency.

Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer and senior Pentagon official, agreed.

“This leads us to wonder how someone so young could have access to some of our most sensitive data and intelligence documents to inform our most senior officials,” he said.

“This should make us think about who has access to this level of material and how and why we allow people to print that material.”

Two major changes to the way intelligence has been handled in the past helped set the stage for the most recent leaks.

After andI September 11, intelligence agencies began to do so share material much more widely across the government.

Later, after the intelligence assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction failed, intelligence agencies began to share more of the sources of their information and their confidence in the reliability of the material.

Gerstell said those changes were made for good reasons, but they went too far.

Now, access to some confidential secrets is “just incredibly wide“, She said.

“We have gone too far and made it accessible to a wide range of people precisely because we never want to be in a position to say that we could have prevented something if we had shared this information,” he said.

“We have a ‘need to know’ principle of making information available, but we don’t really follow it in practice.”

US intelligence agencies have strict guidelines on who can access information, but the military has adopted a looser set of rules that, in effect, allow Anyone with a security clearance to access the documents of a number of spy agencies.

According to Gerstell, a “zero trust architecture” is needed to protect information.

With this template, people would be able to see the title or title of an intelligence document, but they would have to check your credentials to see the details.

This would allow for better control of who accesses information and how often.

Conversely, under the current system, “once you are authorized, you have the right to most“, She said.

On Thursday, hours after Teixeira’s arrest, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks sent a memo reiterating the rules for handling classified material.

“Personnel with access to classified information are trusted custodians of that information, and the responsibility to safeguard classified information is for life.

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Source: Clarin

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