The Discord Leaker Was a Narcissist, Not an Ideologue

Even before U.S. Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was arrested on Thursday as the leaker of dozens of classified government documents that have made their way around the internet in recent weeks, the inevitable comparisons with Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden suggested that he was the latest in a long line of mass leakers of intelligence. As one journalist reported on the most generic of similarities, “Like Manning and Snowden, Teixeira has a military or intelligence tie as a member of the Massachusetts Air Force National Guard.”

Indeed, in the last decade, a new digital generation of insider threat has emerged to challenge secrecy in the U.S. intelligence community, a phenomenon that author James Bamford has described as a “uniquely postmodern breed of whistleblower.” That’s true as far as it goes, but Teixeira should not be thought of in this vein. It would be like saying a Yugo is like a Mercedes because they both have four wheels and an engine. Sure, everyone working in the U.S. Defense Department’s sprawling intelligence apparatus is part of that bureaucracy, but that’s a tautology. It would also be correct to observe that nearly every spy in American history has had a “military or intelligence tie” as well, but that doesn’t explain much in the Teixeira case.

The real but superficial comparisons to leakers like Snowden and Manning classify Teixeira as a mass leaker on a personal crusade. But this is incorrect. Snowden and Manning leaked classified documents to journalists and activists to help bring about the kind of world they wanted to live in—one of citizen-enforced governmental transparency where states have less power. While foolish and misguided, they were ideologically motivated in taking their reckless actions.

In contrast, it seems that Teixeira simply displayed terrible judgment and was showboating his access to privileged information to increase his street cred with pals on the internet. In that sense, he was more like an irresponsible teenager who took his parents’ Ferrari out joyriding with his gearhead friends. Teixeira isn’t a “new breed” of insider threat, and he certainly isn’t a whistleblower seeking to publicize some perceived wrong.

Snowden’s mass leaks in 2013 were not the first digital challenge to the U.S. intelligence community. Three years before, then-U.S. Army Private Manning provided 500,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, which published them to great fanfare for transparency advocates and caused much consternation in Washington. These are not isolated cases; if anything, the tempo of such mass public disclosures seems to be increasing. In March 2017, the CIA fell victim to what is known as the “Vault 7” series, in which sensitive computer tools for digital surveillance and cyber operations were given to WikiLeaks and published online.

Disgruntled former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte was found guilty of the breach (and also of possessing child pornography, again suggesting an anemic background investigation). Although Manning, Snowden, and Schulte represent the most significant mass leakers of classified information, others have played smaller roles. For instance, National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Reality Winner printed a sensitive document from the NSA computer system and sent it to the self-described publisher of “adversarial journalism,” the Intercept, run by journalist-activists originally linked to the Snowden leaks.

Yet treating Teixeira as another in an increasingly long and embarrassing line of leakers impedes the lessons that can and should be learned from this case, which is marked by social adherence to a gaming community more than a cause. What these leakers do have in common with Teixeira is that—as far as anyone has proven—not one of them carried out the intelligence breach acting as a recruited agent on behalf of a foreign power. They are thus not “spies” in the traditional sense of the word.

Instead, they are what we have described in our academic research as self-directed insider threats: intelligence professionals who chose to betray their oath to protect classified information and did so on their own initiative. Some acted on their political or ideological beliefs, others for disgruntlement, to show off, or even to win arguments in gaming chat rooms. As the Teixeira charging documents allege, his intent was to “discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars.” It was not some kind of misguided protest about U.S. domestic or foreign policy. Washington is apparently not yet prepared to understand such a vector of counterintelligence vulnerability.

To be sure, Teixeira otherwise shares much in common with leakers such as Snowden and Manning. They were all young people of junior rank (despite Snowden’s ludicrous claims that he was some kind of “senior advisor”) in sensitive positions in the U.S. intelligence community who abused their access to classified information to share it with people who had no right nor reason to know it. They were all grandiose enough to think that they wouldn’t get caught (or, if they were, would be lionized enough to avoid criminal penalties), and none of them realized the broader geopolitical or diplomatic ramifications of their actions.

In practice, whatever the motivations, the damage is just as real as if they were spies. As long-serving Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles explained in 1963, providing secrets for public consumption has the same net effect as “betraying it to the Soviets just as clearly as if he secretly handed it to them,” and it is thus reasonable to charge Teixeira under the same criminal codes as the other mass leakers. But that’s where the similarities end.

Ideologically driven betrayal is a well-trodden path in the annals of espionage, from the communism-inspired “Cambridge Five” spy ring during the Cold War to the Cuban sympathies that motivated Ana Montes, who was recently released from prison after serving 20 years for spying for Cuba. Preventing those with divided loyalties from accessing state secrets has given rise to the modern system of periodic background checks, invasive polygraph testing, and the requirement that those with security clearances document any foreign travel or meaningful foreign associations. Yet very few of these measures seek even to identify, much less prevent, self-directed insider threats such as Winner, Manning, Snowden, and the like.

Effective frameworks for personnel security and counterintelligence require understanding the varied (and often multiple) motivations for insider threats. In this case, it seems that Teixeira’s access to classified systems far exceeded his professional remit. Further, it seems clear that the counterintelligence vetting process failed to pick up some rather radical and distasteful views, but these views do not seem to be his motivation for leaking. It seems more likely that Teixeira’s narcissism, bad judgment, and arrogance got the best of him, although some of these traits can be hard to uncover in a traditional background investigation that is often more concerned with blackmailable behaviors than judgment. The U.S. intelligence community will almost certainly conduct a thorough post-mortem of the Teixeira case for lessons learned, and it may be prudent to look beyond his recklessness to discern not only how he got a clearance and why he had such unfettered system access, but also why the government was unaware that its secrets were circulating around the dark corners of the internet for months before he was arrested. The task of counterintelligence trolling of the internet for loose secrets will doubtless require new protocols and legal authorities. In the meantime, the Band-Aid of “security refresher training” will be urgently added to the schedule for the hundreds of thousands of clearance holders—the vast majority of whom already understand the responsibility that comes with a clearance.

Such a post-Teixeira study may suggest that it is time to revisit the post-9/11 collaborative framework of “need to share” and revert to the Cold War’s stricter “need to know” principle. Perhaps the Defense Department will close off intelligence as an initial career thrust for the most junior personnel in the same way that certain specialties (such as working in embassies or in special operations) requires a higher rank and more professional experience. Could the intelligence community differentiate accesses to intelligence between those who need to use the information for their jobs and, on the other hand, those who just need to keep the systems running? For instance, while Manning, Winner, and Schulte had substantive roles dealing with classified intelligence as part of their jobs, Snowden and Teixeira were essentially system administrators. Further, might access to national secrets prudently require an age minimum, just as the Constitution requires for officeholders in the Senate or presidency? After all, the prefrontal cortex responsible for judgment and restraining impulses develops well into one’s mid-to-late 20s.

Or perhaps there is simply an irreducible minimum of bad apples and poor judgment in an enormous—by international comparison—U.S. intelligence community that is comprised, after all, of people. Important decisions will need be made about insider threat protocols, and further actions need to be taken in light of this event. It does no one any good to peddle in false comparisons, such as painting Teixeira as another crusading mass leaker. Only with clarity can the intelligence community hope to learn from this unfortunate event.

This is the analysis of the authors alone and represents no official U.S. Defense Department or government position.