In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material? What I wanted to know was: How did he ever get accepted into the Air Force in the first place?
Teixeira seems to have leaked that secret information for online bragging rights rather than ideological reasons, so his transgression probably wouldn't have fallen under the military's newly reinforced regulations on extremist activities. After he was indicted, however, perturbing details about his behavior emerged, including his online searches for violent extremist events, an outsized interest in guns, and social media posts that an FBI affidavit called "troubling" and I'd call creepy.
