A brushfire of leaked U.S. secrets sputters out on the battlefield in Ukraine

Top secret documents leaked by a single airman stationed at an intelligence unit on Cape Cod have rattled the Pentagon, raising questions about the security of U.S. military secrets.  How could 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a so-called Air Force “cyber transport system specialist,” have had access to some of the most sensitive military information on the planet?  How was he able to spread it around the internet for so long without being caught?  Where were U.S. security experts at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) when this was going on?

All of these questions are important, and some of them have begun to be answered.  The New York Times reported recently that Teixeira began spreading important U.S. military secrets as far back as February of last year.  He posted summaries of secret documents on Discord, “a social media platform popular among gamers,” the Times reported. About 600 members of a chat group on the platform had access to the secrets.  Teixeira’s first leaks of the top secret material began only two days after Russia had launched its attack on Ukraine and included information about Ukrainian and Russian casualties, as well as details about aid provided to Ukraine from NATO countries including the U.S.  Teixeira told members of the Discord chat group that he had access to secrets that came from the American intelligence community. 

This is an excerpt from my bi-weekly Salon column. You can read the rest of the column at the Salon website: Salon.com