If this isn’t aggravating enough, how about those morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others of her ilk who want to paint this clown as some sort of hero? Rather like the über-libertarians who claim that the traitor Snowden did a good thing.
I love reading your stuff, even if I haven't commented, until now. I just have a couple of points that stuck out to me.
Point I
Forget who it was, or how old he was, I want to know how he was able to just walk documents out of a secure area, off of a government facility and to his house so that he can photograph them, and then return those documents back to the secure area inside of a government facility without them being missed or found in his possession.
Point II
I think that age is and should be a factor in security determining clearances, and it has to do with the final step of rational maturity in the brain isn't complete until roughly the age of 28. It's that very "edge" the military likes in its personnel, because it that's the age where the ability to reason and rationalize is still being formed. This is also the same age bracket that the military has the most behavioral problems with. Prisons, too.
This is not unknown to the Department of Defense and all the various branches. It's not unknown to the Department of Justice, either.
Also, the lack of criminal history is meaningless for someone 18-21. Most juvenile criminal activity goes unreported or gets expunged by the court at when they become an adult.
I'm not saying you don't grant security clearances to people under 28 years old, but maybe they should be monitored closer and audited more often.
So 1 - he doesn’t have to return them. He can fold the piece of paper up, stick it in his pocket and walk off with it. The info is stored on the JWICS server. It’s not like he stole a hard coy doc.
2 - by that rationale, we can’t charge 21 year olds with crimes such as murder, rape, etc. either. They’re either adults or they’re not. He committed a crime period. If they understand that murder is against the law, rape is against the law, etc., they can certainly understand that disclosing classified is against the law. They get retraining every year too.
3 - thank you for commenting. It’s always good to see your posts.
Incidentally, there IS an active, ongoing conversation in criminal justice circles about whether crimes by people in the 18-21 age range should be treated differently, for this exact reason.
I hate that idea, TBH. Old enough to drink? Old enough to serve in the military and even die for your country if necessary? Old enough to drive a car and kill someone with it? But not old enough to be treated like the scum you are? Hate it.
1 - There should be a time stamped record and terminal each time he accessed those files. There would also be a record of whether he copied them to a flash drive, along with the serial number of that flash drive.
My point is that a security system shouldn't be vulnerable to a single IT person of low rank without some safeguards in place. I see no evidence of any safeguards.
2 - Not saying that at all. By the time they are sixteen, they know the difference between right and wrong and the consequences for their actions. But it is that final period of maturation -- that goes up until around the age of 28 that determine their ability to reason and how to control their urges and reactions to different stimuli. This is the age where they take the most chances, where they are their most irrational. They don't make the greatest decisions at this age.
Take this kid for example. I'm betting that not all that deep down he's a good kid that just made a series of very bad decisions. I'm sure that as soon as this story became public, he quickly realized that he had severely screwed up. He probably thought that he was truly in a "private group" and that they were all on the same "page" so to speak about how to handle these documents he was sharing with the group. I'm sure he never intended anyone to repost them outside his little Discord bubble. His lack of reasoning can be attributed to his still maturing prefrontal cortex -- the part that determines your judgment.
No flash drives. Not after Manning. And you’re assuming there’s no way to track that. There are perfectly valid reasons to print out docs. They need to remain in the SCIF though, and there’s no way to know of misdeeds until they show up on a discord channel.
How old was Snowden? How old was Robert Hanssen, for that matter? How old was Montes? From what I’ve seen a little over 28 percent of spies have been you get than 25. I absolutely disagree that the little twerp lacked control.
Teixeira was an IT guy. Young people his age know much more about famine, Discord, and their similar platforms than we do. And he knew exactly that what he was doing was wrong. Good kid? Nope. Don’t believe it.
I do think it’s worth asking deeper questions about scope of access for IT guys. Like with weapons (for those whose jobs involve them), the most convenient thing is “let me get into whatever I need whenever I think I need to.” But, as with weapons, there are some pretty strong security reasons to require extra checks.
I’ve never held a clearance and I don’t know much about how TS/SCI is stored on classified systems, but I would think—and hope—that it’s not done in such a way that any IT technician with that clearance can read any info in the system, regardless of need-to-know access for a particular compartment.
“How do you prevent [crime]” is, for virtually all definitions of “crime,” one of the Nobel-prize-worthy questions in human behavior. *reducing* crime is often relatively easy. Reducing to zero is double-plus hard.
I did ask those questions. Frankly, there’s no good answer, unfortunately. Ultimately, a message needs to be sent. A strong one. Letting Manning out of prison early sent the very wrong message, TBH. These people need to serve hard time for the entirety of their sentence. The pentagon has already been warning service members about these channels like Discord and others, but I don’t see how they can control what people do outside work.
Maybe instead of stupid annual training that people sleep through, develop actual certification exams that are challenging and require critical thinking about disclosures, and if the individual doesn’t pass, no access.
But ultimately, I don’t think you’re going to stop people from doing what they want. You have to catch them and punish them so subsequent imbeciles think twice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mind you, I have no idea what he specifically leaked: I did not look closely *on purpose*, because those are the rules. From the brief glimpse I saw in news reports, I'm guessing he brought his smartphone into the SCIF, and snapped away.
I know some SCIFs have Phone detectors, and some don't. Guessing his SCIF didn't. . . .
Judging from what I'm reading, he printed out the docs and took them home. He then transcribed them into the Discord group. After a while, he got sick of writing, so he started taking photos with his phone and posting them. I can't imagine no one would see him bringing a phone and taking photos in a SCIF. But who knows?
Our FSO sits in the office next to mine. We get about a phone a week from people who simply **forgot** they had them on them. (Which is why mine live on lanyards. Since I have to badge in, kind of hard NOT to see the phones if you didn't secure them in the phone lockers. . . )
If the mook took active measures, i.e. shut down completely, placed in a Faraday bag to get it in and out ( sensors are typically in airlock doors), and he was in an out-of-the-way office or cube. . . .it's likely nobody would catch him.
If this isn’t aggravating enough, how about those morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others of her ilk who want to paint this clown as some sort of hero? Rather like the über-libertarians who claim that the traitor Snowden did a good thing.
No kidding. If they have no comprehension of national security, they just need to shut their ignorant maws.
I love reading your stuff, even if I haven't commented, until now. I just have a couple of points that stuck out to me.
Point I
Forget who it was, or how old he was, I want to know how he was able to just walk documents out of a secure area, off of a government facility and to his house so that he can photograph them, and then return those documents back to the secure area inside of a government facility without them being missed or found in his possession.
Point II
I think that age is and should be a factor in security determining clearances, and it has to do with the final step of rational maturity in the brain isn't complete until roughly the age of 28. It's that very "edge" the military likes in its personnel, because it that's the age where the ability to reason and rationalize is still being formed. This is also the same age bracket that the military has the most behavioral problems with. Prisons, too.
This is not unknown to the Department of Defense and all the various branches. It's not unknown to the Department of Justice, either.
Also, the lack of criminal history is meaningless for someone 18-21. Most juvenile criminal activity goes unreported or gets expunged by the court at when they become an adult.
I'm not saying you don't grant security clearances to people under 28 years old, but maybe they should be monitored closer and audited more often.
So 1 - he doesn’t have to return them. He can fold the piece of paper up, stick it in his pocket and walk off with it. The info is stored on the JWICS server. It’s not like he stole a hard coy doc.
2 - by that rationale, we can’t charge 21 year olds with crimes such as murder, rape, etc. either. They’re either adults or they’re not. He committed a crime period. If they understand that murder is against the law, rape is against the law, etc., they can certainly understand that disclosing classified is against the law. They get retraining every year too.
3 - thank you for commenting. It’s always good to see your posts.
Incidentally, there IS an active, ongoing conversation in criminal justice circles about whether crimes by people in the 18-21 age range should be treated differently, for this exact reason.
I hate that idea, TBH. Old enough to drink? Old enough to serve in the military and even die for your country if necessary? Old enough to drive a car and kill someone with it? But not old enough to be treated like the scum you are? Hate it.
I won't get into it here, I just wanted to note for context that it's out there.
1 - There should be a time stamped record and terminal each time he accessed those files. There would also be a record of whether he copied them to a flash drive, along with the serial number of that flash drive.
My point is that a security system shouldn't be vulnerable to a single IT person of low rank without some safeguards in place. I see no evidence of any safeguards.
2 - Not saying that at all. By the time they are sixteen, they know the difference between right and wrong and the consequences for their actions. But it is that final period of maturation -- that goes up until around the age of 28 that determine their ability to reason and how to control their urges and reactions to different stimuli. This is the age where they take the most chances, where they are their most irrational. They don't make the greatest decisions at this age.
Take this kid for example. I'm betting that not all that deep down he's a good kid that just made a series of very bad decisions. I'm sure that as soon as this story became public, he quickly realized that he had severely screwed up. He probably thought that he was truly in a "private group" and that they were all on the same "page" so to speak about how to handle these documents he was sharing with the group. I'm sure he never intended anyone to repost them outside his little Discord bubble. His lack of reasoning can be attributed to his still maturing prefrontal cortex -- the part that determines your judgment.
This explains it better: https://shorturl.at/dnpA1
No flash drives. Not after Manning. And you’re assuming there’s no way to track that. There are perfectly valid reasons to print out docs. They need to remain in the SCIF though, and there’s no way to know of misdeeds until they show up on a discord channel.
How old was Snowden? How old was Robert Hanssen, for that matter? How old was Montes? From what I’ve seen a little over 28 percent of spies have been you get than 25. I absolutely disagree that the little twerp lacked control.
Teixeira was an IT guy. Young people his age know much more about famine, Discord, and their similar platforms than we do. And he knew exactly that what he was doing was wrong. Good kid? Nope. Don’t believe it.
So how do you prevent this from happening again? And again and again and again?
I do think it’s worth asking deeper questions about scope of access for IT guys. Like with weapons (for those whose jobs involve them), the most convenient thing is “let me get into whatever I need whenever I think I need to.” But, as with weapons, there are some pretty strong security reasons to require extra checks.
I’ve never held a clearance and I don’t know much about how TS/SCI is stored on classified systems, but I would think—and hope—that it’s not done in such a way that any IT technician with that clearance can read any info in the system, regardless of need-to-know access for a particular compartment.
Can’t say much about that. But suffice it to say that if you are an IT guy working on a JWICS system, you need access to it.
“How do you prevent [crime]” is, for virtually all definitions of “crime,” one of the Nobel-prize-worthy questions in human behavior. *reducing* crime is often relatively easy. Reducing to zero is double-plus hard.
Also, remind me not to type replies on my phone! Good lord!
I did ask those questions. Frankly, there’s no good answer, unfortunately. Ultimately, a message needs to be sent. A strong one. Letting Manning out of prison early sent the very wrong message, TBH. These people need to serve hard time for the entirety of their sentence. The pentagon has already been warning service members about these channels like Discord and others, but I don’t see how they can control what people do outside work.
Maybe instead of stupid annual training that people sleep through, develop actual certification exams that are challenging and require critical thinking about disclosures, and if the individual doesn’t pass, no access.
But ultimately, I don’t think you’re going to stop people from doing what they want. You have to catch them and punish them so subsequent imbeciles think twice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mind you, I have no idea what he specifically leaked: I did not look closely *on purpose*, because those are the rules. From the brief glimpse I saw in news reports, I'm guessing he brought his smartphone into the SCIF, and snapped away.
I know some SCIFs have Phone detectors, and some don't. Guessing his SCIF didn't. . . .
Judging from what I'm reading, he printed out the docs and took them home. He then transcribed them into the Discord group. After a while, he got sick of writing, so he started taking photos with his phone and posting them. I can't imagine no one would see him bringing a phone and taking photos in a SCIF. But who knows?
Our FSO sits in the office next to mine. We get about a phone a week from people who simply **forgot** they had them on them. (Which is why mine live on lanyards. Since I have to badge in, kind of hard NOT to see the phones if you didn't secure them in the phone lockers. . . )
If the mook took active measures, i.e. shut down completely, placed in a Faraday bag to get it in and out ( sensors are typically in airlock doors), and he was in an out-of-the-way office or cube. . . .it's likely nobody would catch him.
I have no insight to discuss what the facility is like, so who knows? Not going to speculate.