What Is Going On With Secrets

It's been a crazy story about U.S. military intel on Ukraine leaking via a Discord social media app managed by pro-Putin Jack Teixeira, and there's several out there talking about it, but Emptywheel has some solid takes on it like this one:

It’s something like 34 paragraphs deep into this WaPo report on how a bunch of documents got shared on a Discord server named “Thug Shaker” before WaPo reveals there was another name for the specific room in which someone who works on a military base shared classified information: bear-vs-pig, an allusion to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine...

Indeed, even the teenagers interviewed by the WaPo describe, whether they recognize it or not, that “OG” is a narcissist craving for adulation, even if comes from teenagers or people posing as teenagers in a Discord chat room...

And whether the foreigners in the Discord server had followed OG there or even had elicited these leaks, they surely saw the same thing a bunch of teenagers saw: he would and did leak to feed his own ego and rationalized doing so with claims about the Deep State, the same kind of claims that the former President spreads regularly...

Emptywheel brings up a similar point in another article:

Dan Froomkin says reporters should call Jack Teixeira’s release of highly classified documents “theft,” not a leak, distinguishing “public-spirited” leakers from “self-serving … thieves.” Spencer Ackerman muses that Teixeira, “leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout...”

A bunch of people who made their careers because a young, narcissistic IT guy stole a shit-ton of records about which he had little personal expertise — some incredibly important, a great many useful only to America’s adversaries — seem to be uncertain what to make of Jack Teixeira, who, early reports at least suggest, is an even younger narcissistic IT guy who stole a smaller shit-ton of records about which he had even less personal expertise, some newsworthy, some useful primarily to America’s adversaries...

The common thread, when one looks back at the history of espionage, national security leaks, and other misadventures is the level of ego that plays into the motive. Even in matters where the intent was honest - like whistleblowing about criminal intent, or at least attempting to warn people about the dangers that were coming - the person leaking that information is doing so out of ego-stroking.

Everything revealed so far about Teixeira points to a very young man desperate for validation - someone who washed out of military special forces and stuck to a low-ranking office job - who got offered the keys to a treasure chest and decided to steal from that treasure to show off to his fellow wingnut gaming buddies. At no time did Teixeira share the classified documents he had to the traditional media or even any of the Far Right media outlets he followed, at no time did he play the valiant role of whistleblower.

Jack Teixeira took advantage of a unique and troubling moment in human political affairs: A moment where the expansive system of National Security classified documentation is most vulnerable to a global interconnected social media network where a single individual could expose everything in the blink of an eye (or in the snap of a smartphone camera).

Seriously, look at our modern tech. We're carrying around miniature computers in our pockets (or on our wrists) with more calculating power than a 1980s desktop computer, with built-in cameras that would put the cigarette case spy cameras of 1960s James Bond movies to shame. All of that connected wirelessly to cell phone signals or wifi links across every cafe and public meeting place.

All of that available to any number of people motivated by modern social norms to promote themselves as Influencers on TikTok or YouTube or Twitter. "See, I got something you don't, and doesn't that make me impressive!"

We are at the point where everything we know about maintaining an edge on National Security - to keep us one step ahead of Russia or China or Iran or even Aruba - is at risk of a young low-ranking military officer with no idea of the severity that classified information is all about willing and eager to pose as above and beyond the E-3 status of their payroll.

It does not help that our Top Secret classification system is massive: Too many people creating too many documents where a lot of those documents don't need actual TSI tags but still get them because their agencies are driven by the desire to classify as much as possible to avoid any risk. Instead, they're now creating that risk because they need too many people in the military and intel agencies to handle all that damn paperwork in the first place.

There's been calls over the years that we need to cut back on the number of classified documents, that we're accidentally - or worse, intentionally - drowning ourselves needlessly in secret paperwork. We're now at the point where the intelligence community is going to break, not from a covert spy war with a foreign power but with our own nation's social media addicts.

Too many secrets. Too many idiots in charge of those secrets. We're starting to see a dangerous trend.