US arrests suspect behind leak of Pentagon documents | Hacker News Reader

US arrests suspect behind leak of Pentagon documents

theguardian.com

32 pointssyliconadder16 comments

Why on earth would this article list personal information about the suspects family, their location and their marital status?

Excuse me, but in what (other) country do you access top secret military data when you're 21 ?

You're not considered adult enough to drink or sign papers or handle yourself until you're 21, but you can get a gun, join the military, and be trusted with Top Secret data ?

Also, how some bloke in a military base could justify he needed to access large quantities of documents about Ukraine?

Was he leading troops that were there ? He's a bit young to do battle plans, doesn't he ?

Under what extent can the US government be trusted to handle military secret ?

Either this poor guy was arrested to pretend to have a suspect, like in Farenheit 451

Or the US military is a band of rookies, who have had their 2nd leak since Snowden.

> Excuse me, but in what (other) country do you access top secret military data when you're 21 ?

Lots of places.

See for example the number of times (5) secret documents have been leaked by players of War Thunder to try to settle internet arguments[1].

[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/video-game...

Well, just like Snowden, he was a trusted IT drone. He likely had access to backups and all the same resources Snowden did. Additionally, there's a lot of damage rogue IT personnel can do with a promiscuous network sniffer.

Nobody invited him to the war room or entrusted anything to him. He was willing to exploit his access to impress some racist idiots on a Discord channel. It is what it is.

We need to pump the brakes on the hyperbole. This isn't Snowden v2.0. This is all mid-tier analysis work, mostly just document production. There are no revelations of clandestine activities, no spies got burned, no new sources were revealed. Quite frankly what's been reported so far is mostly unsurprising. It's a bunch of powerpoint slides and such generated by a huge analyst bureaucracy.

Most likely the guy got access to it because he's an admin on the data store that holds it. It's very difficult to generate mountains of documents like this without granting some kind of IT staff the ability to read them.

Now, given the application, surely there needs to have been some kind of backstop against deliberate espionage and treachery. And it was probably poorly designed. But nothing here seems "surprising" to me, really.

> Quite frankly what's been reported so far is mostly unsurprising

exactly, very little revealed seemed to be beyond what can be inferred from existing sources...

We don’t know if any spies are going to get burned or if any methods will be discovered and shut down. There was intelligence on specific things individual foreign leaders said in private. Combined with other info, that could definitely lead to spies getting killed. This is often the way spies are discovered.

> Excuse me, but in what (other) country do you access top secret military data when you're 21 ?

This is meant to be rhetorical. Let’s just get that out of the way.

The answer is…”just about all of them”.

A 21-year-old can be four years into their career. A competent, responsible professional.

You’ve completely missed the point.

It is an oversight failure of some kind though.

young people having important access is not that rare

there are people in their early twenties working in pairs in ICBM silos, trusted to oversee a massively deadly weapon

(see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0mDATn80QU - one of the silo officers is 23)

It looks as though the 'need to know' principle wasn't respected at all in terms of giving people access.

Age is not what matters here.

I think the really shocking thing about these leaks is the lack of partitioned access.

As noted:

> In a pointed tweet, Tom Nichols of the Atlantic, who himself had security clearance for 35 years, said: “I hope this guy isn’t the leaker, because I’m gonna have some questions about how a Mass Air Guard guy got CJCS [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] briefing slides.[1]

Apparently he was working in intelligence for the Air Guard, but that really doesn't explain the level of access he had.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/13/who-is-jack-...

He was an IT specialist, so it's easy to reason that he had access to a JWICS terminal or something and looked things up from there.

This shouldn't imply access is unpartitioned.

I can look things up on a company Google Drive. Doesn't mean I can see everything!

There is more of this story to come out. A better headline would name him as "suspect believed to be involved in leak." It is not at all clear he was solely behind the leaks; indeed its not clear why he would have had access to the documents in question at all.

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