What Kind of System Lets A 21 Year Old Twerp Leak A Trove Of Classified Military Documents!

This recent unlawful disclosure of classified national security documents caused America to breach its duty to many countries ones which are our strategic allies but which is especially tragic and harming to our national character is the betrayal to Ukraine in this time of war for these good people who are fighting for their survival! The fact that these leaks were not as a result of a foreign espionage effort but rather from a 21 year old national guardsmen who worked as an IT specialist who disclosed this classified information to improve his reputation amongst a group of people he met on a social media website doesn't mitigate the harm he did to America and directly to our important ally Ukraine.

When one considers the major earthquake size classified document leaks of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning one should conclude that America's leaders need to get their act together and protect the country's interests and character. Wisdom seems to me to call for the policy that America should have separate data centers, computer networks or servers and the like for major areas of national security interests, don't go crazy just what ordinary people would think this is a whole major subject, where for the data center for one subject that data center is only accessible for government workers that work on that subject. For example, you would have a data center on Ukraine and another data center on China and another data center on North Korea, etc. and only cleared government workers that are working on the subject of the data center would have access to the respective data center this way you would cut down on the chances of the current scenario occurring in the future where you have a security leaker that metaphorically just takes a machine and just mows down America's interests with a whole slew of countries because the person has access to classified information on so many different topics; honestly, the harm this 21 year old caused cannot be fully repaired!

The other thing that wisdom calls for is that in regards to these computer data record systems, users and I mean nobody should have the ability to print the computer records or download the computer records to an external storage device if the users needs to show some douments in the system to high level officers or national security officials allow the user to download the record to a file in the original storage data system that would be accessible for that user for say 72 hours where if he or she was going to a meeting in the White House or Pentagon or CIA Headquarters they could access only that file from a conference room in the respective building but only view the file no printing and no download! Printing and Downloading should be seen as a problem because that facilitates or enables the leaker to leak the documents to unauthorized users.

The Department of Justice should create an outstanding deterrent with the prosecution of this 21 year old national guardsman it doesn't matter that he had no malicious intent he broke the law and innocent people specifically Ukrainian soldiers will almost certainly die because of his leak of this classified information. In the media it was reported that the leaked documents contain information about the Ukrainian counter attacking units being assembled and trained in and outside of Ukraine and the weapon systems they will have; this will cost Ukrainian soldiers lives. Because if the Russians know how many fighting vehicles, armored troop carriers, howitzers and tanks each of the nine counter-attacking brigades will have when these brigades actually launch their counter-attack the Russian Generals will know how much Russian military resources they need to move to block the counter attack and as the counter-attacking battle unfolds and Russian command sees how many Ukrainian weapon systems they have destroyed they will be able to assess the counter-attacking potential of the remaining Ukrainian brigade and they can adjust the deployment of their forces to complete the blocking action, this leak just gave valuable military intelligence to Russian commanders to help them effectively deploy their resources along the entire battlefield front. The stark meaning of this is that Ukrainian soldiers will be killed and wounded because Russian Generals have been given this edge in deploying their forces. This national guardsman that leaked this incredibly sensitive military intelligence on the Ukraine military deserves at minimum a twenty-five year prison sentence; this is such an egregiously bad act here betraying Ukrainian soldiers who are fighting a war giving their lives that will spare American men and women having to fight this Putin Army in ten to fifteen years it would be morally just to give this guy a sentence of capital punishment!

 

Why the DoJ? He is a member of the military, this falls under the DoD and the UCMJ. And at this time the charges he is facing call for up to 15 years. But that is always subject to change if more charges are filed as they uncover more evidence.

 

Reading up on his background and family history there was nothing to indicate he was inclined to irresponsible behavior, and in fact it is still unclear he was solely responsible at this point, and not a victim of hacking and/or scapegoating himself. That's what courts are for. Much of that info will likely not be made public, and probably shouldn't.

What it does point out is a failure by our own security efforts to detect these documents long before, when they first were leaked onto the internet. With all the spider bots scavenging the net out there, at some points in the day there are as many as 60 at a time here, they should have been noticed a lot earlier. Hopefully that gets corrected. He was not working unsupervised, after all.

 

Most of what you say is POT ON. .. especially your analysis of the advantage Russia will have by knowing what equipment and resources Ukrainian forces have. This called the ORDER OF BATTLE and is an essential intelligence component. Again, you are SPOT ON.

The military resisted all the digital communications, thumb drives, and download stuff when I was on active duty. When a classified document above the level of SECRET (which we often aid read like a comic book), it was guarded closely. It could only be transmitted over a classified system, could only be viewed by folks that not only had the clearance... but a NEED TO KNOW. I can't imagine a military Private having a need to know anything that was classified. Obviously, the need for an IT guy has punctured that principle.

When I was the Commander of a Heavy Artillery Battery in Europe (with SECRET (BI) TS COSMIC) security clearances (COSMIC is NATO Top Secret), as well as a bunch of "compartmentalized" clearances dealing with the nuclear weapons I controlled) I was required, from time to time, to send/receive classified documents TOP SECRET and above. I had to drive twenty miles to V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt (the IG Farben Building) to a SCIF to do that. They also had a telephone to accommodate any highly classified phone calls.

I never saw any Private involved in any of that... ever. Now they need an IT Private to make the whole system fall apart.

I remember going home on leave and meeting my 6th grade teacher... and my Latin teacher from high school. They asked me why some government guys had come around asking about me. It seems improbable that such expense was ever spent on the background of a PFC.

But, to me, it seems that digital technology set us up for this. I remember getting a digitally transmitted SECRET document about how the seeker head on a Stinger Missile works, complete with diagrams. I couldn't believe that such an unsecure medium could ever be used to send such data.

 

IT guys, by necessity, have the clearances of the systems they are working on, so an IT guy who works and maintains classified computer systems is going to have the highest level clearance of the information on it's servers. But the problem with IT guys is they don't actually work with the classified information on their systems, so they don't really understand the sources and methods involved in the collection and analysis of the products. That's why you have a guy like Snowden, another IT guy, who had no real comprehension of why those documents were classified the way they were and thought nothing of releasing them based on whatever crazy pro Russia/China-lolbertarian nuttiness he thought justified it.

This guy seemed like he just wanted to win arguments with his discord buddies, which is equally stupid.

 

I have to admit, I find the leaks we have had in the last few decades fascinating. And it is obvious that the majority of them have just been largely unedited mass dumps with little in common among the items leaked.

One aspect I find particularly fascinating is the Bradley Manning data. By that time most were saying repeatedly that there were no WMDs in Iraq, there never were WMDs in Iraq, and it was all a lie. And a lot of the Manning release was actual documents about the huge numbers of WMDs found all over the country, as well as chemical labs that had been discovered. All of which for one reason or another was never released to the public and remained classified.

But that to me largely shows how some simply ignore or discard any information they do not agree with.

 

We need to plug that hole

 

Well the Manning leak doesn't really fit in my thesis, since he was an Intelligence Analyst (35F) of sorts, although I regard the 35F's as the bottom basement of the Army intelligence fields. But he was a screwed up misfit, with apparently little or no actual duties and no supervision on his deployment to Iraq so he could spend hours and hours each day copying classified material onto a physical medium and taking them out of the SCIF with no one questioning him.

As for the WMD issue, there were actual news reports about the discovery of WMD's in Iraq, but they were never publicized much. The news media obviously had no interest in it but more surprising was the Bush administration never touted it, apparently on Karl Rove's orders. That was a major mis-step, but on the other hand, we didn't have a real idea of what we were expecting to find anyway. I think some people thought that if there was no missiles ready to launch on New York inside a volcano, then it was all a lie. Buried chemical artillery shells, with sarin traces were a lot less dramatic.

 

I wish I knew how. At this point, we need those IT guys, but we have not figured out how to make IT guys take classified information seriously.

 

As a guy that held a TS(BI) COMIC SCI clearance... years ago.. I think the whole problem is about digitization of data. Before you could put the world on a thumdrive an d distribute it to the world... we were much more secure. In my old world, everything was in hard copy... with a cover that said SECRET in big red ... ore TOP SECRET in violent YELLOW.

 

Keep it all in hardcopy. It used to work well.

 

And kept in a vault where anything inside had to be either read inside the vault, or checked out from the clerk inside and only viewed in a secure area.

Back in 1988 when some high members in the government came to my base, the itinerary was locked inside the Regimental CMS vault. And when we were writing out the orders relating to the visit the Lieutenant had to go to the vault and check it out. Then after going through it with the S-2 to determine what was unclassified would give us the draft copy we would put into orders. And when done it went right back into the vault. Things were a lot easier to secure back then, as it was almost always a hard copy that was locked up when not being used. And the CMS clerk checked to ensure that the person requesting information actually had the clearance and need to know before they could see it.

Today, anybody with SECRET can see almost anything on the SIPR system. This has been an issue for decades, but there is really no way around that short of throwing away the entire SIPR system and returning to 100% hard copy.

 

Well we're way past that now, and actually have been way past that for decades already. The intelligence community, throughout the military, law enforcement, and civilian intelligence agencies, all are connected via worldwide intranet systems. The weakness isn't the format or technology, it's the human element.

 

And that is EXACTLY why a 21 year old E-3 can turn the world upside down.!!! We're SCREWED!

 

lol and the same geeks and bankers want to turn the whole economy 'cashless'. Now that is a CF just waiting to happen already, and we're at 80% digital now.. If the military can't protect its data, nobody can.

 

That is actually because of the majority of consumers. They are the ones that made that decision.

In many ways, I am a rarity. I have not bought anything online other than software since 2010. And that was only because between 2009 and 2010 I was not in the US so the only way I could get things like books and movies was via the Internet. But in the 13 years since I returned, I have bought not a single thing online. All of my purchases have been in local stores.

In fact, that is why I laughed about a decade ago when some were screaming the "big box" stores were killing local businesses. That was never true, it was the Internet that was killing them. A fact many only started to realize when a lot of the big box stores also started to get into trouble.

But the "80% digital" that you claim? That is entirely because of the consumer and nobody else.

 

Stores are trying to force it on people now. I've had to 'remind' managers at Walmart more than once when their electronic checkout stands weren't taking any cash payments some mornings that it was illegal to refuse legal tender as payment for goods, especially necessities. They suddenly stopped making it a hassle to pay with cash and the two near me have actually put a real checker at at least one register most mornings now.

Banks love people using debit cards, so they can suck fees out peoples accounts for overdrawing their accounts, and of course credit card companies rake a fee off of every transaction, and few stores give discounts for cash, so people who do use cash get over-charged to subsidize the plastic junkies. Nobody seems to complain about that causing inflation but they will whine all day if somebody thinks a burger flipper should make more than 3 cents an hour.

That '80%' is the portion of total retails sales transactions paid via credit card or debit cards, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, and only 20% or so is in cash now. I have no reason to doubt it from personal experience in stores and restaurants.

 

And that is actually against company policy. As even when there are self-service registers, there is to be one register manned for things like that. Especially where alcohol is purchased, as most states outlaw self-checking for alcohol and tobacco. If they were doing that, it was the decision of the manager on duty and they were actually violating corporate policy (if not state law).

And once again, that is at the request of customers.

I am old enough to remember when credit cards were only good at department stores, and almost no other retail establishment. I want to say the first real big push was around 1985 when some started to offer STAR and other interbank transfer systems for purchases. That was shortly after you were finally able to pull money from a different bank with an ATM. They just tapped into the same system, and soon it became available all over (with normally a $0.50 fee). Then in the early 2000's, adding VISA and Mastercard capabilities and creating "debit cards". But that by far was because customers wanted it more than anything else.

I still remember being amazed when in 1982 I could pull money out of my account at another bank with my ATM card. And a few years later being able to buy groceries or a hamburger with one. But it took well over a decade for that to replace checks, and decades to become what you are seeing now. But there is absolutely nothing stopping you from throwing away your debit card, and just using paper checks and cash as we did even 2 decades ago.

 

No, it isn't; one Walmart here has the single register open, the open a few miles away never has a manned register open.

If you want to make a case that customers are stupid I certainly won't argue against that.

 

Apparently that was an extremely poorly run intelligence squadron. They have suspended the commander and at least one aide.

 

Then write a letter to corporate, as they are not only violating company policy, but likely state law as well.

And at every bank of unmanned registers, there must be an employee on duty with a working register. I have never seen a self-checkout area at any retail establishment ever that did not have a cashier that had their own terminal on duty. Grocery store, hardware store, it does not matter. I have never seen self service without an employ and register of their own.

If it bothers you that much, simply go to self service and request that cashier to check you out.

 

I already posted how I handled it at the store I go to, but thanks for playing. And yes, it is illegal to refuse legal tender as payment for debts.

 

Actually, no it is not. There is absolutely no law that mandates that any person or company accepts cash.

But please, feel free to look it up and find one.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

At my own store I had a policy that I would accept no cash payments over $100. If they wanted to pay more than that, it had to be with a check or card. I simply refused to ever have large amounts of cash on hand in order to reduce the risk of being robbed. I even had a sign stating so on the front door.

So you are wrong yet again. Have a nice day.