Jack Teixeira, Edward Snowden, and plugging intelligence leaks

In 2013, after National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked highly classified data to the press, the intelligence community started plugging its computer ports.

Mr. Snowden had copied the data onto a thumb drive. So the intelligence agencies took enormous effort to cork their computers’ USB slots.

“They fixed that problem,” says Glenn Gerstell, National Security Agency general counsel from 2015 to 2020, of the USB drives. “But ... we were fighting the last war.”

Ten years later, National Guard Airman Jack Teixeira – an information technology worker at a base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – is accused of leaking hundreds of documents onto a server on Discord, a gaming site. No thumb drives this time – he allegedly just printed the pages and walked them home.

The case shows how many cracks remain in America’s classification system, a decade after the Snowden security debacle. In interviews with the Monitor, politicians and former officials describe a process of clearing staffers, classifying information, and then later declassifying it, which remains broken.

Major leaks are still rare, despite the fact that some 4 million Americans have security clearances. But many experts say the system is failing at its core goals: vetting who is trustworthy, limiting access to sensitive information, and deciding what should be classified.

Last week a bipartisan group of senators, including the chair of the Intelligence Committee, introduced two bills that they say will help fix the problem. Among other measures, the bills would task the director of national intelligence with leading a “whole-of-government reform of the classification system.”

“Given the explosion in digital records, the status quo is no longer tenable,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “We’ve got too many people with access to a system that is devoid of accountability and has grown increasingly byzantine, bureaucratic, and outmoded.”

Yet even if the bills pass – and that’s a big if – it’s not clear whether they would be the roots-up reform that some officials argue the system needs. The U.S. intelligence community spans 18 agencies and two branches of government. Reforming that could require an entirely new government approach to secrecy.

Many efforts

Speaking at a press conference last week, the four senators who introduced the two bills – the Classification Reform Act and Sensible Classification Act of 2023 – seemed both excited and fully aware their effort is one more in a long line of attempts to solve a very big problem. 

In 1997, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy issued a report arguing that Washington is near-addicted to secrecy.

The 2005 Presidential Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction described the enormous cost of leaks, which it called a “seemingly intractable problem.”

In 2013, after leaks by Mr. Snowden and Chelsea Manning, a former soldier and intelligence analyst, the Pentagon began a working group on unauthorized disclosures and commissioned a study on the topic from the Rand Corp., a think tank.

“Sometimes around here you have to fight over a long period of time before you finally wear down the opposition,” says Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, who introduced the two bills with Sens. Warner; Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas; and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.

The latest legislation has multiple targets.

First, it would try to cull the amount of classified information. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence would gain authority to review and simplify procedures for classification/declassification. The Public Interest Declassification Board would get more funding.

Second, it would mandate a security review of presidential and vice presidential records before they leave the White House – helping avoid the accidental removal of classified documents.

Third, it would seek to manage leaks. The director of national intelligence would have added power to improve government IT systems. There would be minimum standards across the executive branch to prevent insider threats.

“This has been one of those problems, again, that we’ve all known about,” said Senator Warner at the press conference. “But you’ve got these kind of bookends of the recent disclosure by this airman and the presidential documents that I think [have] forced action.”

Many needs

Look at it another way, though, and the bills’ breadth suggests a system with too many needs for reform.

The problems of overclassification and leaks are related, but obliquely so – not to mention the mishandling of presidential records. Add to that the balance of power between Congress and the White House, which Senator Warner concedes will never want “Congress weighing in on this issue.”

It’s a dam that would be hard to plug with two bills, much less one – the number that Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida and vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, says he’ll accept.

“They’ll both have to be synthesized,” says Senator Rubio. “We’re only going to pass one bill.”

Meanwhile, some former intelligence-community officials such as Mr. Gerstell support a mix of additional physical and technological security.

Guards at sensitive information sites should perform more spot checks, top-secret printers should have ATM-style cameras, and sensitive documents could also automatically have thin radio-frequency identity (RFID) tags attached – similar to those that trip alarms on retail merchandise. Artificial intelligence, too, could monitor the patterns of every employee with a clearance and identify unusual behavior - such as Airman Teixeira allegedly accessing top-secret slides that he did not need for his work.

“Some progress has been made, but there’s a lot more work to do,” says Kari Bingen, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence from 2017 to 2020.

When Ms. Bingen was in office, the Pentagon shifted away from its former system of investigating officials with a security clearance – a touch-and-go background check every five years. It adopted a process of “continuous evaluation,” which monitors cleared officials on publicly available databases, such as crime records, for untrustworthy behavior.

It also helped speed the crawling pace of security clearances, which reduced a backlog of around 725,000 in 2018 to 200,000 today. It’s a reminder of the incremental victories that have so far been won to improve the classification system – and also of the battles left to fight.

“I think the wars continue,” says Senator Moran, smiling in the Senate basement. “There is no last war.”