It Aint As Gucci As People Think...,

NYTimes  |  In the Air Force, Airman Teixeira became a low-level computer tech at Otis Air National Guard Base in Sandwich, Mass., where his mother said he worked nights, helping maintain secure networks. There, he had broad access to a secure facility where he could access a global network of classified material from the military and 17 other American intelligence agencies.

Authorities say that Mr. Teixeira eventually leaked dozens of documents containing potentially harmful details about the war in Ukraine and other sensitive national security topics. 

That a 21-year-old with so little authority could have access to a such a vast trove of top secret information might surprise the general public, but people who have worked in the intelligence world say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.

Those workers can log onto the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — essentially a highly classified version of Google — and in milliseconds pull up briefings on Ukraine, China or nearly any other sensitive subject that the U.S. government collects intelligence on.

Though his motivations may be different, Mr. Teixeira is remarkably similar to two other high-profile leakers in recent years, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, said Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who held intelligence roles at the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 of giving more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. Ms. Winner was a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist working as a military contractor who in 2017 printed out a classified report on Russian hacking, hid it in her pantyhose, and gave it to The Intercept.

Unlike Ms. Manning and Ms. Winner, who came to be seen as whistle-blowers motivated by ideology, Airman Teixeira did not appear to be driven by government policies, according to people who knew him online.

But all three were relatively young and had security clearances that were the classified intelligence equivalent of having the keys to dad’s red convertible.

“Clearly their relatively young age is a common factor, and I would hope the intelligence community is thinking about that,” said Bennett Miller, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst. “The problem is that the community needs these people. It can’t work without them.”

The words “top secret” may conjure images of pristine vaults and retinal scanners, Mr. Miller said, but in reality, while some highly classified material is siloed in special access programs, most of the rest is accessible to thousands of ordinary people who have security clearances. And security can be surprisingly lax.

Often, these systems are basically just a bunch of computers on a desk and there is “nothing really stopping anyone from printing something and carrying it out,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “It ain’t as Gucci as people think.”