Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-25

[Sheilbh]

I think your theory of the case is that a Trumpist analyst in the CIA made the drop to discredit Biden.

Me?

Not at all - my general theory of everything is that things are what they seem to be

So here my guess is loads of people in the US have access to intelligence data, see Snowden. People love arguing online and video game nerds are particularly susceptible, see Languish. And here we are.

Edit: And I think a lot of this sounds like a young man showing off online - someone in their early twenties first hinting at and then showing intelligence docs to a closed server of, by the sounds of it, younger impressionable teens.

[garbon]

I think your theory of the case is that a Trumpist analyst in the CIA made the drop to discredit Biden.

Me?

Not at all - my general theory of everything is that things are what they seem to be

So here my guess is loads of people in the US have access to intelligence data, see Snowden. People love arguing online and video game nerds are particularly susceptible, see Languish. And here we are.

Edit: And I think a lot of this sounds like a young man showing off online - someone in their early twenties first hinting at and then showing intelligence docs to a closed server of, by the sounds of it, younger impressionable teens.

I immediately contrasted it with Languish and wondered if we'd ever help someone depressed or cry when someone left.

[Tamas]

IT's fucking ridiculous is what this is. He needs to be made an example of.

[Razgovory]

They need to be made to live as a bison on the Great Plains!

[Syt]

I think your theory of the case is that a Trumpist analyst in the CIA made the drop to discredit Biden.

Me?

Not at all - my general theory of everything is that things are what they seem to be

So here my guess is loads of people in the US have access to intelligence data, see Snowden. People love arguing online and video game nerds are particularly susceptible, see Languish. And here we are.

The online tank combat game War Thunder had multiple instances where someone argued that the stats of some tank were wrong and then posted classified material to prove their claim.

[The Larch]

Leaker has been identified as a 21 yo from the Massachussets national guard.

[The Brain]

Leaker has been identified as a 21 yo from the Massachussets national guard.

If that's the actual leak why did he have access to those documents?

[The Larch]

Leaker has been identified as a 21 yo from the Massachussets national guard.

If that's the actual leak why did he have access to those documents?

Apparently the guy works at a military base handling that kind of documents.

[Sheilbh]

Leaker has been identified as a 21 yo from the Massachussets national guard.

Thank God that's too young for any Languishites

If that's the actual leak why did he have access to those documents?

I think he worked at a base in the Pacific Northwest - based on the Washington Post piece. But also I remember being astounded at the number of people in the US who have top secret clearance after the Snowden leak - just checked and it's 1.3 million people. Which seems high.

[Barrister]

If that's the actual leak why did he have access to those documents?

I think he worked at a base in the Pacific Northwest - based on the Washington Post piece. But also I remember being astounded at the number of people in the US who have top secret clearance after the Snowden leak - just checked and it's 1.3 million people. Which seems high.
[/quote]

Either 1.3 million is way too high, or top secret clearance is way too broad.

Man - I remember the hoops I had to jump through to get just Secret clearance back when I first joined DOJ, and even then I couldn't access anything outside of Justice itself.  The idea they'd give some 21 year old national guardsman access to this kind of intel blows my mind.

[Grey Fox]

I read it somewhere else and don't care to look for it again (probably Reddit).

It claims that basically junior staff does analysis and that's why they get access to so many classified intel.

[The Larch]

I think he worked at a base in the Pacific Northwest - based on the Washington Post piece. But also I remember being astounded at the number of people in the US who have top secret clearance after the Snowden leak - just checked and it's 1.3 million people. Which seems high.

On the coat tails of the Trump investigation about him keeping secret documents after he stopped being president, I read some articles of people saying that it should be a warning about how out of control the classified information system had been stretched, how too much stuff was getting classified and how so many people needed to have security clearances to be able to handle those documents.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think I've mentioned it before--DoD has put out public facing reports on it, pundits (including many who served at the highest command levels) have talked about it, we just have a real bad problem with a lot of the overarching ways we handle classified information.

First, we generate literal mountains of it, this alone means that over a million relatively mundane employees need security clearances to do jobs that are not very closely related to national secrets. This creates a huge regime where we have so many people with clearances, there is no way you're exercising any rigorous oversight of them.

Obviously the government has ways to try and do better, there are different classification levels, code word classifications etc. The core problem is there is a "classification escalator" over time.

In the golden old days we had in ascending order: Restricted (deprecated) or Confidential documents, Secret Documents and Top Secret documents.

Top Secret documents were intended to be the gravest most serious secrets of State, and the handing out of access to those was supposed to be incredibly limited. When they say over a million people have clearances now--they are literally talking clearance to view Top Secret documents, i.e. our highest broad classification level. This is because the classification escalator has pushed so many mountains of documents up to that level, you have 7 digits worth of people who need to be able to see them to do their job.

We have other ways we try to be better, for example in theory just because you have a TS clearance doesn't mean you can just email someone asking for random copies of TS documents. You're supposed to be restricted to what is needed for your job. Code word documents, a layer of classification layered on top of TS, means you have to have the specific code word clearance to see those documents. This is supposed to be a way to formally compartmentalize so much that only few people can see such documents. But even code word documents, in some contexts, are overly shared. On top of all that the idea that among the TS classifications everyone is really kept as properly compartmentalized as needed is a huge farce.

Edward Snowden is a big example of this. His system administrator role actually could have been totally segregated from any access to actual documents, there are plenty of IT systems in place that allow a systems administrator to control servers and systems without having easy access to data, in fact many private companies use such systems specifically so they aren't faced with the liability of an unscrupulous IT guy fishing through confidential customer data. It is simple incompetence we don't do a better job of really compartmentalizing and actually keeping people who don't really need to see the data, from seeing the data. Instead we lean on classification as a crutch. "Okay, we don't want to solve the problem of Sys Admins having a lot of access but it being complicated to make it so they can't see certain docs, so lets just make sure our Sys Admins are TS cleared which means we can trust them anyway." Okay, but how well can you really trust 1.25 million people?

[Legbiter]

Leaker has been identified as a 21 yo from the Massachussets national guard.

Behold the Zoomer menace.   

[Josquius]

Why the duck does the massachusettes national guard have access to this level of intelligence.
Hardly top secret...