The government has dealt with prolific leakers of classified material before, but never one with the profile and motivation of National Guard Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira.
The Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting hundreds of classified military documents online made a brief court appearance Wednesday. Wearing handcuffs and an orange prison jumpsuit, the accused waived his right to a preliminary hearing as a Boston federal judge gave his legal team a two-week extension to prepare for his defense.
Mr. Teixeira’s case, which has deeply embarrassed the Biden administration and posted hundreds of sensitive and secret U.S. intelligence documents and analysts online, bears some resemblance to other notable leakers of government secrets like Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden — each had a connection to the military or an intelligence agency and access to top-secret information because of their job. But that’s where the similarities appear to end.
The rupture this time, analysts say, appears not to be ideological but generational.
Manning and Snowden handed over top-secret documents to shine a light on issues they believed the public should know about — the scope of U.S. intelligence operations around the world and the lack of public oversight. By contrast, the alleged motive for Airman Teixeira was more prosaic and Gen-Z: He was trying to impress his virtual friends in a gamer chatroom on the popular Discord social media app.
“I’ve been in this business a long time but that’s a new one on me,” said James Carfano, a retired Army official and now a senior official with The Heritage Foundation think-tank. “I think it’s kind of typical how we’ve schooled this generation.”
The 21-year-old Air Guardsman is accused of sharing hundreds of classified documents with other young members of the “Thug Shaker Central” chatroom, documents he obtained through his work as what is essentially an IT worker for the Massachusetts Air National Guard. The information includes top-secret material on such issues as the state of Ukraine’s ongoing war against Russia and U.S. assessments of Taiwan’s ability to withstand an attack by China.
In one bit of irony about the case, Airman Teixeira on paper is exactly what the kind of recruit the U.S. military has targeted as it grapples with the most pressing manpower shortages in decades. He is young, tech-savvy and deeply familiar with the social media landscape in the Age of TikTok. With cyberspace a critical battleground of 21st century war, military recruiters have made a conscious pitch for gamers, hackers and others familiar with the modern world lived online.
“I don’t know the backstory of this particular kid, but we’re making the same mistakes we made in the 1970s,” Mr. Carafano said. “We have to appeal to these kids to come in on their own terms. We’re kind of reshaping the military to make it more palatable to them.”
Writing this week in Foreign Policy.com, Jonathan Askonas, an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, and Renee DiResta, a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, noted that it was not the first time that classified material wound up posted on a site for virtual game devotees.
“This leak,” they wrote, “is not a strange one-off but a harbinger of a future where secret statecraft meets an online world in which, for many people, the virtual is replacing the physical as a source of companionship, camaraderie and social clout. This online world is fast replacing traditional espionage as a source of intelligence leaks — a shift that has profound implications for the future of spycraft, especially counterintelligence.”
Marek N. Posard, a military sociologist at the Pardee RAND graduate school, said criticisms being leveled at Airman Teixeira and his Gen-Z peers were also used against those from earlier generations. But there are concerns related to the Teixeira case that need to be addressed by Defense Department leadership, he said.
One defense Airman Teixeira may use is that he did not know — or appreciate — that what he did was wrong, in an age where Web users are used to putting all kinds of personal data online and having few expectations that information can remain private for long.
“Over 50% of the active duty enlisted force is 25 years of age or younger. They tend to be early adopters of new and emerging technologies,” Mr. Posard said. “It highlights a need for our leadership to understand what types of [social media] platforms they’re using; what [information] they are sharing, and warning them accordingly. It’s just like what we used to do in World War II: ‘Loose Lips Sinks Ships.’”
Flurry of activity
Airman Teixeira’s arrest last week has prompted a flurry of activity throughout the Defense Department. In addition to the ongoing federal criminal case, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered an investigation into security measures throughout the U.S. military. The Air Force also stripped the 102nd Intelligence Wing, Airman Teixeira’s unit, of its mission. The wing’s duties have been temporarily reassigned to other units, the Air Force said in a statement.
New technologies give people a greater opportunity to communicate than at any time in history. That raises an important question anytime the military is part of the equation, Mr. Posard said.
“There are new opportunities to engage with people. If you are a foreign intelligence officer, you do not need to be in the same physical location anymore with someone who holds a clearance,” he said. “You can build relationships in these online forums and you can build relationships one-on-one.”
Hundreds of leaked Pentagon secrets were posted in the restricted, private chat room Airman Teixeira moderated for months before they were eventually transferred to more public parts of the Discord site and then given wide distribution. Retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, questioned why the government isn’t doing a better job monitoring social media sites for classified data.
While government investigators must operate within the law, including requiring warrants before a search can be conducted, the private sector could carry out basic “data-mining” tasks without those restrictions, he said.
“Just hire someone and ask them if there’s classified material on these sites,” Adm. Montgomery said. “I think there’s a technology solution to this.”
About a decade after Chelsea Manning, the onetime Army soldier in Iraq who was court-martialed for violations of the Espionage Act, the Defense Department still isn’t running automated systems that can detect anomalous online activity, said Adm. Montgomery, director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.
“We still haven’t figured this out,” he said.
Mr. Askonas and Ms. DiResta write that “a closer look reveals that many significant intelligence leaks over the past 15 years have been substantially motivated by online reality. These leaks are not the product of espionage, media investigations or political activism, but 21st-century digital culture: specifically, by the desire to gain stature among online friends.”
Admiral Montgomery said 99 out of 100 service members would never think to copy down classified documents and post them on social media.
“Hopefully that number would be even higher because if 1% of your people were leakers, you’d be in real trouble,” he said. “This is a generational thing. [Airman Teixeira] did this to be kind of an influencer in his little group. The commodity he was using was access to interesting information.”
The military needs to do a better job training its young service members on the need for operational security. But merely cranking out yet another tedious PowerPoint presentation won’t be sufficient. The training must connect why the rules and regulations are tied to the mission at hand, Mr. Posard said.
“It has to be clearly communicated so those inside know why they should be sharing information,” he said. “They have to know why they should be vigilant when they see individuals in their unit potentially engaging with individuals where they might be at risk.”
It’s also important not to focus on any particular social media platform, whether it’s Discord, Reddit or TikTok, Mr. Posard said:
“Platforms rise and fall. You don’t want policies that are designed for MySpace if [the service members] aren’t using MySpace.”
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.