RETHINKING - APRIL 24, 2023 - JACK TEIXEIRA, ONLY ANOTHER LEAKER

 
Some days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion column from the journalist Daniel Henninger titled “Our Jack Teixeira Problem”.

Starting with the case of Air National Guardsman, the WSJ’s columnist made a review of a series of digital leakers of state secrets in the last fifteen years.

Mr. Henninger wrote “The revelation that for months the video-gamer community was able to see highly classified intelligence documents allegedly pilfered from the U.S. government by a 20-something Air National Guardsman has repeatedly raised the question: How could this happen?”

After that, the WSJ’s columnist reminded us of other cases of leaking highly secret documents that showed recently the vulnerability of the information systems of the national intelligence services. He compared Teixeira’s case with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and others. Do you remember some of these cases?

We have to observe that all these cases have common points. Secret documents of the government were revealed by youngsters with special affinity for computers and technology while nobody was monitoring their actions.

After the analysis of cases, the Wall Street Journal journalist concludes his column with skepticism about the supervision levels of organizations of the national secret services.

Myself, after years working in the monitoring of security issues of the technology systems, I have similar thinking to Mr. Henninger.

A lot of young technicians who play with computers like to test the vulnerability of the systems. And frequently, their supervisors don’t look into the wrongdoing of their employees because they don’t realize the danger that these technicians mean for intelligence services.

I agree with Daniel Henninger about Teixeira's case. In the last paragraphs of the column, he says: “the bureaucracies will wait out the story’s brief attention span and let calls for accountability evaporate.”

And I would like to add that probably, in the short or long term, another computer genius will again put at risk the national intelligence services because according to all the cases, we see that nobody questions: How to avoid it happening again?