The editors of the Washington Post remark on the security breach:
Keeping secrets is essential to a functioning government. Breaking the laws for a psychic joyride is a despicable betrayal of trust and oaths. In the course of the investigation, it should be determined why such highly-classified materials were available to someone of a junior enlisted rank, and why they were apparently sitting on a gaming server for a month before U.S. officials realized it.
The U.S. classification system for managing secrets is overwhelmed. The Public Interest Declassification Board warned three years ago of an explosion of digital information that will further strain the system, and outlined a vision for modernization. And as the Editorial Board has argued, too much national security information is classified, and too little declassified. The classification process should be simplified into two tiers, “secret†and “top secret,†eliminating the lower “confidential†level and reducing the number of people with access to the highest levels.
If there is anything positive to come out of the Discord leaks, it should be an overhaul to better protect and manage the nation’s most valuable secrets.
That’s fine as far as it goes but IMO it’s insufficiently critical of those who put the present policies in place or those who were supposed to administer them. They didn’t and aren’t doing their jobs.
Update
The editors of the Wall Street Journal pile on:
One obvious question is why Mr. Teixeira had access to such a range of secrets. The leaked documents, assuming they are real, include intelligence on allied foreign governments and assessments of Ukraine’s progress in its war against Russia’s invasion. Did he need to know? Why did he apparently have access to an internal Pentagon computer network for top secret information? A sweeping review of classified access is needed.
It’s also fair to ask how the documents could circulate for weeks on Discord and then other platforms without U.S. counterintelligence agents finding out until the press reported it. Is this another case of misplaced priorities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
The Justice Department has mistakenly pursued the innocent before—think the FBI’s obsessive focus on Steven Hatfill for the 2001 anthrax attacks. But if Mr. Teixeira is charged, his motive will be important to know. Did he see himself as another Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, who were celebrated by much of the media for their classified betrayals?
The cavalier handling of classified documents by Presidents Trump and Biden has also set a bad example that could cause less respect for the obligations of secrecy. There’s much more to learn—about Mr. Teixeira, but also about the practices and culture of classification that allowed this to happen.
Again, that’s okay as far as it goes but IMO it’s still very mild.
