Why Low-Ranking Soldiers Have Access to Top Secret Documents

Hi, it's Alexa Weibel from New York Times Cooking. We've got tons of easy weeknight recipes, and today I'm making my vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas. This recipe is just built for efficiency. You toss your mushrooms and red onion in your spices, throw them in the oven. By the time they're done, you've chopped your cabbage and you're ready to assemble.

From New York Times I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

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.

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 Teixeira was doing.

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.

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.

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, none of them were able to put pieces together. In a way that allowed anyone to act and prevent the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Right, 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.

So if silent information was the problem before 9-11, JWICS, this Google of American intelligence is going to be a big part of a solution. Because it's gonna force agencies to break those silos down, it's gonna 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 gonna be leaks.

We'll be right back.

I'm Julie Turkowicz, I'm a reporter at The New York Times. I have been trying to understand changes in migration, so I traveled with photographer Federico Rios to the Darien Gap. This hot, mountainous, 70-mile stretch of jungle straddling the border of Colombia and Panama, we're hiking through a river, just like covered in mud.

So, Dave, when does the military first realize, in this new post-911 world of intelligence sharing, that it has a leak problem?

That would be 2010.

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.

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 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.

Right Americans who, for whatever reason, 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-.

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's 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. Which is, if so many people have access to this stuff and there's not really controls on them, 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. That a low-ranking IT guy at a Air National Guard base could have such an outsized access to really sensitive stuff. And so they're trying to clamp that down. 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 air base 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. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 leak. 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.

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, 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.

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 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. 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.