Errant CoC gets hit
Remember an Air Force E-3 name of Jack Teixeira? Here’s a reminder. Aw1Ed and thebesig both wrote about him in April.
Teixeira joined the Massachusetts Air National Guard in September 2019, according to federal court filings. He was granted Top Secret security clearance in 2021, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI special agent. Teixeira also maintained sensitive compartmented access, or “SCI,” to other highly classified programs, according to the affidavit. CBS News
Every time we see one of these bozos like Manning, Snowden, and this year Teixeira, someone inevitably comments something to the effect of “where the heck was their chain of command”? Well, sometimes it’s hard to actually prevent someone committing a crime if they are hell-bent on doing it. But you CAN encourage other chains of command to pay a little more attention to their folks – as they should be doing – by punishing neglect.
Starting on Sept. 7, “Air National Guard leaders initiated disciplinary and other administrative actions against 15 individuals, ranging in rank from E-5 to O-6, for dereliction in the performance of duties,” Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement on Monday.
Punishment ranged from relieving personnel from their positions, including command positions, to nonjudicial punishment under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Col. Sean Riley, commander of the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, and Col. Enrique Dovalo, commander of the 102nd Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group, a subordinate unit at the base, both received administrative action.
Riley was relieved of command for cause, and Dovalo’s punishment was not disclosed. Other prior commanders from the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron who were previously suspended in the wake of the Teixeira leak investigation were permanently removed, the Air Force said.
In April, the 102nd Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group had its mission paused and divided among other units after Teixeira’s arrest. The Air Force said Monday that the group’s mission is still reassigned to other Air Force organizations. Military.com
Seems the Air Force IG investigation found that no one was aware he was leaking information online, but damningly, were aware he was seeking information he was not cleared for and did not take any action.
Category: Air Force
Bend my dotages and send me home?
Make them tag and wear “The Bent Gimlet”
Each commander involved was likely hoping to kick the can down the road for some other commander to have to deal with…then, ironically, talk crap about how whatever action the new commander took was “unsatisfactory” 🙄
The DoD wishes to assure the Nation that no General Officers were harmed in this corrective effort.
The only thing that was aborted there was the chain of command.
Thank you, I will be here all week, tip your waiter.
Make them sit through a few hundred hours of Power Point and 1970s movies about OPSEC and insider threats, then maybe they will get it…instead of pencil whipping it and hoping someone else does something!!
What I read (in opensource) was they had a night shift whose job it was to make sure the computers stayed on, and someone with a clearance could just print anything out they wanted and no one would notice…so Tex’ probably just “volunteered” for night shift an awful lot! Give them the Hillary treatment…do nothing and say she really didn’t mean to…
I worked comm repairs (non secure), and anytime we had an FTX, I volunteered for night shift.
Yeah, winters were miserable, hugging the stoves.
But once the sun was up, stand to & stand down were done, and b’fast was eaten, time to roll up in the sleeping bag, hug yer M16 & avoid all the busy-work that everyone else was subject to doing.
Shhh. You’re giving away Signal Corps secrets. Bad OPSEC, Tox!
Makes me wonder to what extent some of these NCO’s may have been compromised in some way and it led to their inaction.
I’m willing to wager that some E-4, trying to do the right thing, first reported the shitbird, only to be blown off, or worse, treated as if he or she had done something wrong.
I have two trains of thought, the lesser one first…
This dumb kid effectively ended the careers of 15 others. Even those that received NJP will have a hard time recovering after being (Jack) Linked to the Text Kid. Okay, that minor inconvenience aside…
Every one of them, and probably others to include some Gilded Generals, deserved what they got. If anyone had the Texticals to intervene and ask what the hell was going on before this became nationally known, there’d be a little less work for the units that got pieces of the 102nd ISRG’s mission.
Even so, every officer and NCO working around him that ignored Texaco’s improper classified document handling and lack of “need to know”, they were complicit by failing to properly retrain or reprimand him as needed.
Ol’ Tex is probably feeling like a big boy while he’s awaiting his trial. Unfortunately for him, there’s no Xbox (that I know of) or Discord inside there for him to take his mind off of things, and the allegations of violent racist and antisemitic remarks on the server he was admin of won’t help him.
I have a feeling his name will soon be TexBox, if it’s not already. I’m sure that during his trial he’ll be more than happy to activate his Text-to-Talk feature and might even try to incriminate some others for a chance at a reduced sentence.
For conText, it took me 12 years to get a Secret clearance, which I took seriously and always tried to protect. Jackalope here was handed a Top-Secret clearance at age 19 and then given free reign over whatever he could access.
Leavenworth may a big change.
The real challenge rolling in the cyber area today is not enough “skilled” techs to maintain all these high level secure items. Just like you it took me years to get my Secret but once I got into comm networks my TS just appeared. The rest just rolled up as my skills improved and the needs of the USAF kept adding up. We were always short handed in networking, now cyber, then and it sounds like things have not improved in “vetting” some of these young folks.
Still that’s what the cyber NCO’s are there for on the front line at the shop level and I can’t believe these idiots didn’t squash this guy the first time he messed up. Let alone how many more chances they had to stop him. The cyber shop SNCO should have used “TexBox” (that’s a good one, lol) as an example to his junior NCO’s on how to immediately remove and deal with an “insider threat”. Instead they will all now be examples of dumba$$-ery, poor cyber security and lack of NCO accountability. Damn what a black eye this has left on ChairForce cyber… 🙁
100% agreement. There’s a reason that Article 15’s are posted. Slam dunk the violator and let others learn from their pain. It’s not 100% effective but it’s pretty damn good. NCO’s need to remember that they are not that Soldier’s “buddy”. This housecleaning sounds long overdue and should have every leader looking at their own operations.
The moto when I was in (75-95) was ‘When in doubt, Max him/her/it out’ Company grade or Field grade. But if a Commander wanted to drop the big hammer, there is always the Summery, Special (lets go with the Big Chicken Dinner).
I had a CO that liked to use the phrase “I will slam you with the largest administrative hammer available to me”.
Was a lot easier for us “back in the day before everybody had a computer” to control access to secret/sensitive/need to know info. Little bit harder to get into a secure cabinet/safe than it is to click a mouse. I guess what busted his CoC was the part about “…aware…did not take any action.”
I’ve held off commenting on this mess until I’d gotten hold of more details on events leading up to discovery of the spills out in the open. This clown’s immediate supervisory chain new this idiot was accessing stuff he shouldn’t have and did nothing but write memos for record. Didn’t yank the dumba$$ out of the SCIF, didn’t drag him to the Security Office, didn’t pull his clearance/network access immediately and remove him from “behind the fence”. Clearly the unit leadership chain from the CC down did not install a culture of security to the lowest level airman.
As an old comm dude going back to the 491XX AFSC days, I know comm folks are exposed to a lot of “stuff” while maintaining the links and gear that allows our leaders to stay in the know. We were always taught to keep it business, do the fix and let the intel, scope dope or operator weenies do their magic stuff. Just because we know what’s going on doesn’t mean it’s any of our business and we don’t talk about it. Let alone go looking for it and blast it out all over the interwebs like this fool!
Had one troop tell me once they were “uncomfortable” doing our comm work in one of those “areas”. I thanked them for their honesty, immediately de-certified them, walked them down to the Security Office and had them removed. Whole chain of command gave the thumbs up and the individual had a new job away within a couple days. There is no room for lax security ever and these folks really all f@#d’d the hell up.
Hope they take this young man and bury him under Leavenworth. Too much to ask for a firing squad or hanging the traitor nowadays…
“Had one troop tell me once they were “uncomfortable” doing our comm work in one of those “areas”. I thanked them for their honesty, immediately de-certified them, walked them down to the Security Office and had them removed. Whole chain of command gave the thumbs up and the individual had a new job away within a couple days.”
In my opinion, that’s the right way to handle things, but in my experience, there are a lot of contemptuous leaders that take things personal nowadays. In the Army I knew; it was possible that taking the initiative and taking care of both the Soldier and mission would result in pushback. “Hey there SFC, who told you that you could make that decision? Sounds like a leadership failure to me.” If the command did support such a move, the Soldier’s career would probably be adversely affected. “Oh, he can’t do his job in the SCIF? Put him in the Training Room. I don’t care if the Support Battalion needs a computer tech to handle Unclassified systems, PVT Snuffy wants to play reindeer games, we’ll ‘take care’ of him.”
fm2176 I’m very much afraid you are correct. Your example on the “SFC, who told you that you could make that decision” might just be the norm nowadays.
I was very fortunate that I had leaders that “lived” security in those areas back then. As we’ve opened up the lines to share more info for battlespace awareness we’ve also opened ourselves up to more clowns like TexBox and company.
“this idiot was accessing stuff he shouldn’t have”
From what little I have been able to find out, he should not have even been able to access stuff he shouldn’t have. From what I have read he was a hardware tech (apprentice) and had no need to access the network traffic. But, requiring passwords and other security measusres is so inconvenient. Speaking of need to know (or need to exist), from what I have read the 102nd Intelligence (?) Wing was basically a make-work National Guard unit whose very reason for being eludes me, other than providing replacement jobs for the 102nd fighter interceptor wing personnel who didn’t want to move when it went out of business (BRAC. Politics? Heaven forfend! )
The “news” reported he was basically the janitor in the secret documents area. Yeah I know, network “news” hardly a reputable source but given his low rank and age at least gave a somewhat credible reason for his being there. It is hard to believe that more senior folks in the room / building did not get in his face when he was accessing computers instead of sweeping / mopping though.
You would probably be surprised at how much access janitors have to stuff. We are invisible when present and nobody even expects or prepares for us to be present. Had some interesting experiences working as a janitor on a SAC base. Pre-USB, so I do hope they have made some changes.
I wonder how the Life of Riley will go now after this.
My inner 12-year-old is giggling at the title of this post. Does that mean the leadership got their collective pee-pees spanked?
Bottom line here – People noticed and reported it…but NOT ONE reported it to the Security Office that could have effectively stopped it.
Source – work in a Security Office
ps – we take this one personal…hope he enjoys federal prison as much as his cellmates enjoy his ears
It shouldn’t have been. In the Marines and the Navy spaces I worked in, SCI material was subject to the two person rule, so you were never alone with that stuff long enough to steal any of it. Apparently this was not the case here.