The Daily - Why Low-Ranking Soldiers Have Access to Top Secret Documents

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Last week, a 21-year old airman from Massachusetts, Jack Teixeira, was arrested under the Espionage Act and charged with violating federal laws by sharing top secret military documents with an online gaming group.Dave Philipps, a military correspondent for The Times, explains why so many low-level government workers have access to so much classified material.Guest: Dave Philipps, a military correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: The arrest of Mr. Teixeira lays bare the sheer volume of people who have clearance to view a swath of national security documents that the government categorizes as top secret.Mr. Teixeira grew up in a family with strong military ties, was quiet and somewhat awkward in high school and seemed, to some, unnervingly obsessed with war and guns.The Teixeira case is unusual even in the small world of leak cases.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the latest leak of U.S. military secrets, this time by a member of the National Guard, has once again raised a familiar question. Why do so many low-level government workers have access to so many classified documents the reason according to my colleague Dave Phillips is that such access was supposed to

solve a problem not create one. It's Friday, April 21st. It's Friday, April 21st. Dave, one week ago, exactly, there is an arrest in this case of this major leak of dozens of pages of secret military documents that have now been splashed across the front pages of papers around the world and has become a major embarrassment for the U.S. And ever since, you have been trying to understand this suspect's backstory and how he ends up getting these documents in the first place. So tell us what you've found. At first, we found very little. The FBI arrests a suspect, and they don't tell us much. Today, the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira.

His name is Jack Teixeira. FBI agents took Teixeira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident. 21 years old. Teixeira is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard. He's a pretty low-ranking member of the Air National Guard at a base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. And so my colleagues and I start digging around trying to find more. My colleagues went to the tiny town where he grew up, which is southwest of Boston. It's rural. It's really pretty. It's conservative. Voted for President Trump in both 2016 and 20,

which is fairly unusual for Massachusetts. And he seems to have had a normal middle-class suburban upbringing. His mom ran a floral business out of their house. His stepdad was a master sergeant in the Air Force and actually worked at the same base where Tashara is accused of stealing documents. And what people who went to high school with him say is he was kind of an awkward, quiet kid. You know, on the pages of his high school yearbook, he doesn't show up many places. He wasn't in many clubs. He wasn't big in any sports. But what's clear is during his high school career, he was very focused on joining the military. is during his high school career, he was very focused on joining the military. In fact, he joined the Air National Guard even before he graduated from high school, and he missed his

graduation in order to go to basic training. And Dave, what exactly, for those of us who don't know the military nearly as well as you do, is the Air National Guard? Think of the National Guard as the part-time military. They call themselves the citizen soldiers. So what that means is you sign up for a commitment, and you have to go through training one weekend a month and two weeks every summer. And those people, they're there to be called up in case they're needed.

Now, there are also people within the National Guard that will work full time. And that seems to be what Jack Chichero is doing. His job, the official name for it was a cyber defense operations journeyman, which sounds really impressive, but basically he was an IT guy. And he was there at the base working nights, making sure that all the computers worked. The difference between him and his civilian equivalent is he's working on secure networks that handle pretty darn classified materials. And so as part of that job, he needs a top-secret security clearance.

And that clearance not only let him into the room where these networks were, but it let him access computers that held untold millions, maybe, of classified files. And this, Steve, is what allows Jack Teixeira to not just glimpse these documents, but actually take them home. Right. And that's where it gets interesting. Because he doesn't leak it to the press. He doesn't do what typical leakers do. Instead, he goes to a small group of

friends on a social media platform called Discord that essentially he plays video games with and basically shares this top secret info with just a small group of dudes who like to talk about war and play shooter games. And that's where it started. And remind us the kinds of things he's sharing in particular. Some of this is pretty sensitive stuff. It's briefings on all of the details of the war in Ukraine.

So that's the locations of some of the air defenses of Ukraine. It's assessments of how much ammunition the Ukrainians have left and that it's running low, and it's other stuff that is really sensitive, including that there are some American special forces on the ground in Ukraine. This is stuff that the United States military would really, really rather have kept quiet. Right. I mean, it's the kind of information that could affect people's lives. It's the kind of information that could perhaps endanger people's lives,

like those Americans on the ground in Ukraine. And it is stuff that is a crime for him to release. And the leak didn't just stay in Discord. It spills out into other social media, to Telegram, to Twitter, and eventually it's on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, and it has the attention of the FBI. Right. And it's after all this top-secret intelligence hits all these newspapers, including ours, that I think everyone had the exact same question, which is why would such a young National Guard airman on a small base in Cape Cod have so much access to so many military secrets? It's a little bit baffling. Exactly. It's not so much the info that was leaked.

It's the question, how could such a low-level person get their hands on top-secret documents? And that's a really interesting story, and it goes back to 9-11. Let's start with the big intelligence question everyone keeps asking. How could U.S. intelligence have missed the planning of an operation this sophisticated, this simultaneous, this multifaceted? If you remember, one of the things that came out in 9-11 is that several intelligence agencies had some idea that an attack was happening. And all of them had little pieces. But at the time, they weren't good at sharing information. I know how this is going to sound, but I have to say it. I didn't think the FBI would know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States by al-Qaeda.

In fact, they often were competitive and hid information from each other. And so even though many agencies had pieces of the puzzle, from each other. And so even though many agencies had pieces of the puzzle, none of them were able to put pieces together in a way that allowed anyone to act and prevent the terrorist attacks of 2001. I talked to one administration official today. I said, did you have any information about anything like this happening? He said, none at all. And that was seen as an intelligence catastrophe. That was seen as an intelligence catastrophe. I vividly can remember, Dave, reading the September 11th commission's final report, which found that there were agencies within the government that had vital intelligence about al-Qaeda,

but that it didn't get into the hands of another agency that might have been able to do something about it. And it's not that they said that that would have prevented 9-11, but it would have given our government a fighting chance at trying to stop it. Exactly. And right after those attacks, the intelligence agencies, and this is a big ecosystem, it's 18 federal agencies, including the military, they vowed to get better connected, to share better, to gather more, and to make sure that anyone who had a reasonable amount of security clearance could see it. And so they massively expanded an existing global network that was called JWICS. That's the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System. Fancy name, but basically what it is, is it's like a classified version of Google. You know, a vast number of the intelligence material that is gathered by the Air Force,

the Army, the CIA, the FBI goes into this searchable network. And all of a sudden, this network provided information for anyone with a secure JWICs, this Google of American Intelligence, is going to be a big part of a solution because it's going to force agencies to break those silos down. It's going to force them to share information. Right, but it also comes with a cost because maintaining that takes a vast number of people, many of them low-ranking junior people, to process information, to maintain the network. And all those people need access in order for it to work. And so that number just grows and grows. And today, there's something like 200,000 people that have access to this top-secret network. That is an astonishing number. I mean, it's basically the population of a mid-size American city.

That's the number of people within our military system who have access to all this sensitive information on JWICs. Right. And one of the things that the intelligence community is really forced to grapple with is that once you have that many people accessing this huge amount of data, there's a really big danger that there's going to be leaks.

And it wasn't too many years after 2001 that those leaks started to happen. We'll be right back. So Dave, when does the military first realize in this new post-9-11 world of intelligence sharing that it has a leak problem. That would be 2010. Julian Assange is at the eye of the storm over the WikiLeaks documents. But the person who made it all possible is a 23-year-old Army private. At that time, there's a Army specialist intel analyst, a low-ranking worker bee named Chelsea Manning.

This lowly private could read secret cables from American embassies around the world. And she goes into a couple secure networks, including JWICs, that top-secret Google, and she pulls 700,000 military files and diplomatic cables and videos, really sensitive stuff. And she decides that she's not okay with how the war in Iraq is being waged and the public needs to know about it.

And so she gives all of that stuff to WikiLeaks. It was the largest leak of military secrets in American history. And that turns out to be just a huge deal, a major embarrassment. Manning faces numerous serious charges, including aiding the enemy. The first leak of its kind really ever, because previous to this system, there was no way that a low-ranking intelligence analyst could get 700,000 documents. So it very quickly showed the intelligence community, okay, we're in a whole new world now.

Right. We have enabled this. We didn't mean to, but we have. Right. And so they start making corrections. They make it harder to plug a jump drive in or burn a CD. They start making people leave their cell phones outside of these secure facilities. But it isn't too much longer in 2013 that another relatively low-ranking worker... My name's Ed Snowden. A civilian this time named Edward Snowden. Don't know if you remember that name. I do. I'm 29 years old.

I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii. And he takes vast amounts of materials about the NSA's global surveillance system, and he shares them with a number of journalists. First, The Guardian revealed the National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon customers. The NSA monitored phone calls of 35 world leaders. The Guardian revealed the existence of a top-secret program codenamed PRISM.

And so, again, the intelligence community is starting to realize, okay, by being more connected, more open, we are more vulnerable to, I mean, for lack of a better word, like an insider threat. The threat is literally coming from inside the house in both of these cases. This is not an adversary. This is not a breach from overseas. These are people from within the U.S. military system who now have this access, who are creating these leaks. Right. Americans who, for whatever reason, you know, mostly ideological, decide that they see something that they feel needs to be shared. And it doesn't end with Snowden, because just a few years later, in 2017... A 25-year-old woman, a federal contractor with top-secret security clearance,

is in custody in Georgia tonight. A woman named Reality Winner. She's working as a linguist for the NSA as a security contractor, and she finds an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The classified material, an NSA report on a Russian cyber attack on U.S. voting software. And she prints it out, sneaks it out of her secure facility under her clothes, and gives it to the intercept.

So in all of these cases, a clear pattern starts to emerge. All the biggest breaches of intelligence, or at least the ones that we know about, are by young, relatively junior people that are working in this vast system. And even though they don't have much authority in this vast organization, they have tremendous access and can essentially spill all this really sensitive information out into the world. And that's exactly the thing that we saw

from Jack Teixeira. Dave, we are putting these four leaks in kind of the same bucket, I feel like. But I wonder if we should. I mean, is what Jack Teixeira leaked to his friends on Discord the same as what Edward Snowden leaked to the world, what Chelsea Manning leaked to the world? Right, that's a good question. You know, if you're just looking at the materials, the answer is clearly no. Not only is this a pretty small number of documents, but it largely tells people what they already knew

or figured was going on. There's no bombshell in any of this stuff. But the people that I talk to in the intelligence community, they say that it is right to look at him alongside these other leakers because he reveals the same problem with the system. reveals the same problem with the system, which is if so many people have access to this stuff and there's not really controls on them, you know, there's nothing really preventing another Snowden or another Manning from coming along. And if you believe that what Snowden or Manning did was important or even justified, then obviously that's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you believe, as the intelligence community and the Justice Department certainly does, that those leaks harmed national security, and if you're

the military, you're probably asking yourself, should we be rethinking who gets this kind of access? For them, I think the reason Jack Teixeira is such a big deal is because he's such a small deal. You know, that, you know, a low-ranking IT guy at an Air National Guard base could have such an outsized access to really sensitive stuff. And so they're trying to clamp that down. You know, what they've said publicly this week is that they're culling the list of people that have access to secure networks like JWICs. They have shut down the intelligence mission for the airbase in Massachusetts where Teixeira worked. So they basically shut down his entire unit. That's right, for now. And the Department of Defense has requested that all of its services report within 45 days on what they are doing to make sure that they have the right security and

access rules in place so that hopefully this type of thing doesn't happen again. But the problem is, is that those restrictions don't come without a cost. You know, the harder it is to share intelligence, the fewer people have access to all this stuff, the more likely it is that you're going to have a failure like the one that we saw in 2001, where you're not sharing intelligence, and that creates a big problem. Right. So clearly it's a balancing act. But if we're being honest, and maybe if we're being a little provocative, it does not feel, Dave, as if something like 9-11 is going to happen again. Just because a 21-year-old airman in Cape Cod working on IT support does not have access to secret military documents, right?

So some of this may be doable without perhaps creating a lot of cost. That's true. But at the same time, the system's going to keep changing, and it's going to have new demands, new people that it needs to bring into the circle in order for the intelligence system to work. And it's going to be really hard to make sure that they have access, that they need to do their jobs while not granting so much access that they're going to create another big intelligence league. One of the unique things about the military is that it places enormous amount of responsibility on very young, relatively junior people. I mean, you think about a ground war situation where you might have a platoon leader who's 23 years old. And I think that they view this the same way. We don't have a choice. We are going to have to continue to give a tremendous amount of responsibility to people who are barely out of college or never even went to college. want to do, what they think is one solution is just, you know, rely on that these people have the training and character and ethics to understand that they should do the right thing. Right. The military, you're saying, operates on the honor system. Whether that's a drone operator

that we trust knows their target is the right target, whether it's that platoon leader who will be leading fellow young men perhaps to their deaths, that's the system. That's the contract the military has with the people in it. Right. And the vast majority of time, the vast, vast majority of the time, that works. Right. If you think about it. But there are some times where it all falls apart.

Right. I mean, when you think about it, four meaningful leaks of this kind of information since 9-11 might not actually be that many leaks. Right. I mean, that could be like more than a million people who had access to the JWICS network in that time. I mean, I'm not saying that the intelligence community would choose to have four leaks, but maybe they see it as a cost of doing business.

Well, Dave, we appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. As of Thursday, Jack Teixeira remains in custody in Massachusetts, where he's been charged with violating two federal laws by mishandling classified documents. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Five, four, three. In its first test flight, SpaceX's Starship, the tallest and most powerful rocket in history,

exploded shortly after taking off. We should have had separation by now. Obviously, this does not appear to be a nominal situation. But experts said that what looked like a failure was in many ways a success because the experimental rocket made it clear of the launch pad and traveled for four minutes. Starship is seen as a technological breakthrough because unlike past rockets, it's designed to be entirely reusable. Because unlike past rockets, it's designed to be entirely reusable. SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, said that the Starship will eventually allow humans to travel to and colonize the planet Mars.

And the U.S. military is preparing for the possibility that it will need to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Sudan, as fighting between two factions of Sudan's military intensifies, so far the fighting has killed at least 330 people and injured more than 3,000. That violence and its causes will be the subject of Monday's show. Today's episode was produced by Astatha Chaturvedi and Shannon Lin with help from Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Linn and Liz O'Balin.

Fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsfolk of Winderlea. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you on Monday.