The US Department of Defense is moving to tighten rules over who is allowed to access the most sensitive intelligence, amid mounting criticism of the Pentagon’s policies for access to sensitive material in the wake of the leak of hundreds of highly classified documents.
The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, who has been convening daily meetings to manage the fallout from the leak, ordered a review of “intelligence access, accountability and control procedures … to prevent this kind of incident from happening again”.
On Thursday, just hours after the arrest of Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman suspected of leaking the classified material on an internet chatroom, the defence spokesperson Pat Ryder confirmed reports that the Pentagon was tightening criteria for who was allowed to see secret material.
Teixeira joined the Massachusetts air national guard at 17, and most recently worked on cybertransport systems as a network manager. In a sworn statement, an FBI agent said Teixeira had held a top secret security clearance since 2021.
While Ryder insisted the Pentagon had “stringent guidelines in place for safeguarding classified and sensitive information” backed by criminal penalties for leaking, he said: “We will continue to do everything we can to ensure that people who have a need to know when it comes to this kind information have access to that.”
Separately, the deputy defence secretary, Kathleen Hicks, sent out a memorandum reiterating the rules for handling classified material. “Personnel with access to classified information are trusted stewards of that information and the responsibility to safeguard classified information is a lifetime requirement for each individual granted a security clearance,” she wrote.
Judging by action taken after other major leaks – including that by the National Security Agency security contractor Edward Snowden – the first response is likely to be followed by a more substantial review of intelligence handling.
In a criminal complaint made public on Friday, Teixeira was charged with unlawfully copying and possessing classified defence records. Each offence can carry up to 10 years in prison. He was also charged with another offence which makes it a crime for an employee of the United States to knowingly remove classified records to an unauthorised location.
The leak has prompted a fierce debate over whether procedures for handling intelligence are fit for purpose.
Writing in the Atlantic, Juliette Kayyem, who as a former homeland security adviser to the then Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, oversaw the state’s air national guard, where Teixeira served, said she was at “a loss to explain why a 21-year-old member of the state intelligence wing, who does not appear to have been working in any federal capacity, would need access to the kind of materials” he leaked.
One question that has emerged is why Teixeira would have required such broad access to a defence computer system known as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.
The 30-year-old computer network, currently being upgraded by the Pentagon, was originally designed to handle analysis and material produced by the intelligence community for a much smaller distribution within the Department of Defense.
Over the decades, however, it has evolved to have a much larger role. Speaking in 2018, Gen John Hyten, the then commander of the US Strategic Command, said it had become a “critical tool because it’s the conduit for intel assessments and reports that come to every decision the command [makes]. A lot of our command-and-control functions go through JWICS.” He said: “It’s found its way into every element of our operations.”
The question now, inevitably, is whether too much intelligence was shared with too many people without a clear need to see it.
It feeds into a wider debate that has once again gained prominence in the fallout from the most recent leak: whether the US classifies too much material, requiring security clearances for too many people.
According to a 2020 report to Congress from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center more than a million US citizens have security clearances to view secret information.
Writing earlier this year, Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security programme, warned that “over-classification is both real and rampant”, adding that “between 50% and 90% of classified documents could safely be made public”.
The consequence, she added, was a risk of a “national security harm” she described as far from obvious.
“When so much information is classified, the burden of protecting it can become overwhelming. Under these circumstances, it’s no wonder that busy officials cut corners, or simply make mistakes.
“And they can rationalise these departures because they know that much of the information isn’t particularly sensitive. Over-classification thus not only makes consistent compliance with the rules more difficult; it causes officials to lose respect for the system.”
Historically, analysts point out, the widening of access to classified material followed the intelligence failures around 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq war after it was recognised that key intelligence was not being widely shared enough (in the case of 9/11) or where faulty intelligence was not open enough to critical analysis that might question it (in the case of Iraq).
However, widening of access would later be blamed for the leaks by Snowden, a contractor who was able to download and leak vast amounts of intelligence material.
While access rules were changed again after the Snowden leak, for many, glaring problems still remain.
“Those reforms clearly weren’t effective enough,” Javed Ali, a former senior US counter-terrorism official told the New York Times.
