The world’s media was predictably alive last weekend with speculation about Jack Teixeira, the young US guardsman who was charged in a case involving leaked confidential US defence and intelligence documents. The actual charge levelled against the 21-year-old Airman First Class is the “unauthorised retention and transmission of national defence information, and unauthorised removal and retention of classified documents”, for which he could receive 15 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.
What many people wanted to know is how such a young and relatively junior officer had access to such an array of secrets. And how US intelligence security could have allowed him to allegedly share this classified material on a Discord server normally used to discuss video games.
The affair suggests that US intelligence agencies are still as vulnerable to this kind of leak as it was at the time of Chelsea Manning in 2010. Manning, an army intelligence analyst was released from a US military prison in 2017 having served only a short portion of a 35-year sentence for leaking classified – Iraq war – intelligence material to Wikileaks.
