U.S. intelligence must tighten security in wake of leak, says former CIA officer

As It Happens6:38U.S. intelligence must tighten security wake of leak, says former CIA officer

The U.S. military needs to rethink how it protects sensitive documents, especially ones that are printed out on paper, says a former intelligence official.

Jack Douglas Teixeira, 21, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly leaking highly classified military intelligence records online.

The U.S. Air Force National Guard member, who had top secret security clearance, has been charged with unlawfully copying and possessing classified defence records, and knowingly removing classified records to an unauthorized location.

Former CIA officer and U.S. marine Michael (Mick) Mulroy has questions about how Teixeira was allegedly able to remove those documents, and who might have been whispering in his ear on the Discord chat room where he reportedly shared them. 

Mulroy was U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defence between 2017 and 2019. He spoke to As It Happens host Nil Köksal. Here is part of their conversation.

Can you give us a sense of the severity, the significance, of these charges so far?

So the leak itself, I would say, is probably the most substantial since 2013 when Edward Snowden released about a thousand documents.

From an intelligence perspective, the sources and methods are what are the biggest concern to me as a former CIA officer. We have to protect our ability to collect, and if people know what we know, they can try to figure out how we know it.

Everybody's innocent until proven guilty in the United States, but it looks deliberate. Like, he took these [documents], printed these, folded these up, took them home, took pictures and posted them online — which hits all the elements of the crimes of which he was arraigned today.

Do you think there'll be more charges to come? Espionage, potentially?

I think so, because they seem to be charging him for one specific disclosure. And as we know, these disclosures went back as far as December of last year. And, you know, every day it seems like there's more.

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2 years ago

Duration 2:39

U.S. federal agents arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira, a member of the Air National Guard, for allegedly leaking highly classified documents. According to a friend of the accused, the documents were shared on an online social media platform.

What did you make of what happened in the courtroom? You know, Jack Teixeira is 21 years old. We saw a bit of him in the courtroom telling his dad he loves him. 

I mean, I am a parent and I understand that, and I have a son that's in the military.

However … whether he wanted to harm the United States or not … it did harm the United States, a country of which he took an oath to support, defend.

How and why would a 21-year-old have access to these kinds of documents — some of them labelled "Top Secret" — and then be able to copy and distribute them?

One thing that we're going to have to look at is: How do so many people have access to documents this sensitive? And we're going to need to limit their access.

This individual is what's called a cyber transport journeyman, which in layman's terms [is an] IT specialist, somebody that deals with computer networks. So he probably had access to the system. 

The question I would have is: How can we not monitor whether he's opening up documents that are top secret and he has no reason to have access to? Why doesn't that trigger some kind of alarm? Why doesn't it create a log? How could he then print it without anybody knowing?

We need to put monitoring systems in place, because this could easily happen again. There's many very junior people who are very impressionable that have access to the systems so that they can service them.... But they shouldn't have access to the same documents the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is reading just because they have access to the system to repair problems with the computer.

It's certainly surprising to a lot of us watching this story unfold who don't have experience being inside the military.... You've been inside these halls and you still sound surprised. So was this never a discussion before? 

I think it is something we've understood. This will probably be the impetus for us to actually do something significant about it. 

We want our allies, like Canada, to trust us with their information. And this, quite frankly, indicates that we're not doing everything we can to safeguard our information, the information that's provided by our allies and partners, which they want us to keep obviously secret.

What kind of screening is there for someone who would end up in a role like ... Teixieira? I'm asking that because in terms of the kind of chat group he was on, what we're learning so far about what his motivations might have been, some of the racist language that was used by others on this site, on so many levels and not just access to these documents. 

He had, to my understanding, top secret security clearance. So that's a pretty extensive background investigation. My wife is actually one of the background investigators, so I hear it almost every day. It takes a long time to get that. And they do go into all sorts of personal issues. They talk to friends, neighbours, obviously, look for your criminal record.

I believe they can look at online social presence if it's public. But they obviously can't if they don't know it, and it's not public.

You also have to disclose your contacts with foreigners. And obviously, in our case, anybody who's not American. And some nationalities — such as Russia, for example — does raise red flags. 

And it looks like — and this is just from media reporting — that some of the individuals in this chat group were Russian. And that's going to be looked at to determine whether it was just a coincidence, or whether this individual was targeted in this chat room by Russian intelligence.

You've talked about some of the questions still outstanding in your mind. If you were still in your role as deputy secretary of defence, what questions would you be asking your subordinates? What would you be demanding of them right now?

I would push hard to have a system of which you cannot print copies of sensitive material. And if you did, it would trigger to your supervisors that you're doing it. If you have a reason to do so, they would have to sign an acknowledgement, and then you would have to account for it.

We do have devices — I used to be briefed on them when I was in the Pentagon — that are electronic. They store this information electronically, like a Kindle or an iPad. It's not, but it looks like that. If you leave the building with it, it erases itself. That doesn't happen with paper. 

So if we were using those to brief individuals … those would be much easier to control and easier to ensure that this information doesn't get leaked online. Because when you print something, especially now, where there's no tracking of the printed copy … and it exists until somebody destroys it.