The Pentagon’s safety and oversight measures have didn’t hold tempo with the proliferation of army services that deal with categorized data and the personnel who work there, however the Defense Department doesn’t have a systemic drawback in maintaining its secrets and techniques secret, a brand new evaluation concludes.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered a 45-day evaluation of Pentagon insurance policies and procedures in April after a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman was accused of leaking top-secret paperwork.
Jack Teixeira, the airman, was accused of posting a trove of secret paperwork to a web based chat group. He pleaded not responsible final month to 6 counts of federal legal prices.
Before that, nonetheless, Mr. Austin directed prime aides to find out how huge a safety drawback the Pentagon had on its fingers. Was Airman Teixeira an outlier who violated his oath to not disclose army secrets and techniques? Or was he symptomatic of a a lot bigger drawback inside the army ranks that had gone undetected for years?
The evaluation, which the Pentagon is predicted to launch and describe to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, concluded there was neither a “single point of failure” to clarify Airman Teixeira’s disclosures nor any widespread breakdown within the army’s procedures for dealing with and overseeing confidential data, stated two senior army officers briefed on the evaluation’s findings.
Instead, the evaluation discovered that the spectacular development in army services and other people dealing with categorized data, significantly because the terrorist assaults on Sept. 11, 2001, had far outpaced the army’s capacity to maintain that data safe, stated the officers, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate the report’s main findings.
The evaluation really useful that the division spend extra money, take further steps and assign extra individuals to tighten safety across the dealing with of categorized data, the officers stated. Additional safeguards ought to embody stricter measures to forestall the usage of digital gadgets inside categorized work areas, the place confidential data or photographs may very well be photographed or recorded.
Besides the federal legal investigation, Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Force, has directed the service’s inspector normal to take a look at the Air National Guard 102nd Intelligence Wing, the place Airman Teixeira served, and at how the airman was in a position to publish a whole bunch of nationwide safety paperwork in a chat room for avid gamers. From there, they ultimately drifted to Twitter and the messaging platform Telegram.
New questions in regards to the command surfaced in May, when a Justice Department submitting revealed that Air Force officers caught Airman Teixeira taking notes and looking for categorized materials months earlier than he was charged with leaking an unlimited trove of presidency secrets and techniques, however didn’t take away him from his job.
On two events, in September and October 2022, Airman Teixeira’s superiors within the Massachusetts Air National Guard admonished him after studies that he had taken “concerning actions” whereas dealing with categorized data. Those included stuffing a observe into his pocket after reviewing secret data inside his unit, in keeping with the courtroom submitting.
That data raised troubling questions on whether or not the army missed alternatives to cease or restrict one of the damaging intelligence leaks in current historical past.
Airman Teixeira appears to have retained his top-secret safety clearance after he was admonished and subsequently obtained the second of two certificates after finishing coaching supposed to forestall the unauthorized disclosure of categorized data.
Source: www.nytimes.com