How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[chuckdyke]

12 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Just like Oliver North? 

He became president of the NRA if I am correct. 

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

He became president of the NRA if I am correct. 

Yes.  Before that he had a career on right wing radio (Radio America) along side another convicted felon and opponent of democracy; G. Gordon Liddy.  After that he went to have a show on Fox News then onto his career at the NRA.

Steve

[chuckdyke]

5 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

After that he went to have a show on Fox News then onto his career at the NRA.

Steve

Thanks

 

[Nastypastie]

Not to mention a COLOSSAL failure in supervision. If he was a gear tech how was he left alone with the software long enough to figure it out, let alone either access the databases and print stuff out or sift through loose materials just laying around to take photos. Isn't there a job he's actually meant to be doing?

Anyone in a supervisory role should be quartered for this.

[Yet]

4 hours ago, sburke said:

what planet do you live on where "good Christian boy" precludes bizarre sexual behavior?  For all their ranting about gay drag queen groomers, the worst groomers I've seen are these "good Christian leaders".

anyway I doubt this idiot is gonna get hit with the full ton of bricks.  He wasn't passing to a foreign intelligence agency or trying to sell them,  just being really stupid.

i want to say ...it is not 'just really stupid' to take secret stuff home to your kitchentable. but then again, who am i fooling, there are presidents that do this stuff all the time. 

[NamEndedAllen]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

The down side of that is that it shuts people who are fresh out of college out of clearance jobs, giving them more time to get settled at a high paying FAANG job where none of the clearance hassle is required.

It wouldn’t have to. And your idea could become a graduated ladder of clearance eligibilities.
The clearances come a number of flavors, for a variety of categories.The majority of military personnel are given Confidential clearance, Level 2 access. That includes the National Security Non-Critical Sensitive category. Level 2 also includes the Secret clearance.

It’s complicated. All told there are at least six levels, mixed and matched for six categories, and associated clearance types. They require one or more of at least five different kinds of initial investigations, depending on the clearance. In general there are three kinds of clearances, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Level 3 gets the Top Secret requirement, and differs from Level 2 by including the National Security Critical Sensitive Category.

But it looks as if good ol’ Airman Teixera got his reclassification in 2021, making him 19. His reclass was to Level 4, Top Secret:TS/SCI Eligible. Or at DOE it’s called ‘Q’. National Security Special Sensitive. Yep. Above Top Secret. And it looks like he started right away broadcasting secrets to impress other kids. THAT’S the controversy. The military need not request freaking TS/SCI for a 19 year old for a galaxy of reasons, including your excellent point about the look-back length. 

[chrisl]

16 minutes ago, NamEndedAllen said:

It wouldn’t have to. And your idea could become a graduated ladder of clearance eligibilities.
The clearances come a number of flavors, for a variety of categories.The majority of military personnel are given Confidential clearance, Level 2 access. That includes the National Security Non-Critical Sensitive category. Level 2 also includes the Secret clearance.

It’s complicated. All told there are at least six levels, mixed and matched for six categories, and associated clearance types. They require one or more of at least five different kinds of initial investigations, depending on the clearance. In general there are three kinds of clearances, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Level 3 gets the Top Secret requirement, and differs from Level 2 by including the National Security Critical Sensitive Category.

But it looks as if good ol’ Airman Teixera got his reclassification in 2021, making him 19. His reclass was to Level 4, Top Secret:TS/SCI Eligible. Or at DOE it’s called ‘Q’. National Security Special Sensitive. Yep. Above Top Secret. And it looks like he started right away broadcasting secrets to impress other kids. THAT’S the controversy. The military need not request freaking TS/SCI for a 19 year old for a galaxy of reasons, including your excellent point about the look-back length. 

Most people I know in the aerospace world are TS/SCI - most job ads for clearance related technical jobs in aerospace companies either ask for it or require you to be eligible for it.  They prefer if you already have it so they don't have to pay an engineer to count paperclips for 18 months.  If you're hiring high end engineers out of top schools to work on defense programs they're generally going to be working on things at the higher end of the classification scale.  The difference between them and Teixera is that they all at least have a BS, and most have either an MS or PhD on top of that, so only a few would be getting TS/SCI before age 25 just because of their time spent in higher education.

[cesmonkey]

Can someone with a subscription to Foreign Policy magazine take a look at this article?

Is it making all the wrong conclusions, that I fear the title indicates?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/15/ukraine-leak-intelligence-discord-espionage-gamers-internet-online/
Analysis
How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat
The latest leak has profound implications for counterintelligence.

[Offshoot]

If he has returned and is respected by the rank and file, are the Russians trying to shore up discontent?

[Bulletpoint]

On 4/14/2023 at 9:21 PM, Haiduk said:

Prigozhyn has made a statement that Russia should claim victory and to finish "SVO"

For authorities and society in whole it's need to put an end to SVO. 

Ideal variant - to claim about the end of operation, to tell everyone, that Russia achieved results, which were planned, and in some sense we really achieved it. We grinded huge number of AFU fighters and can account to ourself that objectives of SVO are completed.

In theory Russia already got this bold end by the way of elimination of most part of active men population of Ukraine and by the way of intimidation other it part, which fled to Europe. Russia cut off Azov Sea and big piece of Black Sea, captured fat part of Ukrainian territory and established ground corridor to Crimea. Now only one remnains: to firmly gain a foothold, cling to claws on that territories, which already we have.  

 

In Denmark, we call this "to settle the bill without the host".

[Claymore]

Not quite sure what to say about this.....

 

[chrisl]

8 minutes ago, Claymore said:

Not quite sure what to say about this.....

 

Doesn't look like wood.  Some of the comments suggest it's composite armor.

[womble]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

Most people I know in the aerospace world are TS/SCI - most job ads for clearance related technical jobs in aerospace companies either ask for it or require you to be eligible for it.

Aye, it's not the clearance level that's at fault in this big leak case, it's the compartmentalisation of information at this level (possibly across the board, but possibly at the facility where Teixera worked) that's failed. None of those people "in aerospace" with TS/SCI clearance should have access to the high level summary stuff that got leaked, unless it was to do with the job they were actually working on. They need their clearance, just to get in the door of their workspace.

As has repeatedly been said, a network tech shouldn't have blanket access to all documents of their clearance level or lower. They just shouldn't, and I'm pretty sure that, in general, they don't (because the Internet would be nothing but leaked documents if that were the case), and there's a specific failure of compartmentalisation in Teixera's case.

Over-compartmentalisation of information has been a contributing factor to intelligence failures in the past and does need to be avoided, but the broad-brush synthesis stuff should be controlled in some detail, and available only to the analysts that produce it and the supervisory "high level" folks who are meant to be coordinating responses across agencies.

Age should of course be a factor in assessing security clearance levels. The whole exercise is about risk mitigation, and anyone involved in risk management should be aware that youngsters are at higher risk of poor judgement. But it's only one factor.

[Haiduk]

Hellriders %) (fuses are mounted to mines)

 

 

[Ultradave]

2 hours ago, womble said:

As has repeatedly been said, a network tech shouldn't have blanket access to all documents of their clearance level or lower.

Agreed. That's the rules. Just because you have the clearance level does NOT mean you get to have access to everything at that clearance level. You must have the need-to-know the information in order to perform your job responsibilities, and you the individual do not get to decide that. That need-to-know request is required to be very specific as to what is to be granted access to and has to be submitted by the user's management. 

I had to do that a few times - one in particular I remember was that I was assigned to the inter-agency technical review team for a new nuclear propulsion plant radiation shielding design, which was not what I was working on at the time, and therefore was locked out of any information regarding it (being a cold body reviewer with the years of experience I had). My dept. manager had to certify I needed access and include the letter (e-mail) appointing me to the review team. Legitimate need for access, and I had more than enough security clearance, just until then, did not have the need-to-know.

This is how it's SUPPOSED to work. IMO something at that ANG organization is quite lax and I would guess that's being looked into. We aren't the only ones realizing this.

In the Naval Reactors world, we used to joke that their reaction to problems is always:

1. How many other things could this have affected/happened to? Please review everything and report.

2. How do we prevent this from ever happening again?

They are tight and it's a reason that the Navy Nuclear Program has had such success and a good reputation.

Dave

 

[The_Capt]

10 hours ago, sburke said:

what planet do you live on where "good Christian boy" precludes bizarre sexual behavior?  For all their ranting about gay drag queen groomers, the worst groomers I've seen are these "good Christian leaders".

anyway I doubt this idiot is gonna get hit with the full ton of bricks.  He wasn't passing to a foreign intelligence agency or trying to sell them,  just being really stupid.

What planet do you live on where “gay drag Queen groomers” is going to get a security clearance blocked? - 1950 called and they want their “Commie Deviants” back.  

I am talking about illegal sexual proclivities, which again “good Christians” are not immune; however, in screening he likely came away as completely clean and going to Church every Sunday probably reinforced it.

Edited April 16, 2023 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

13 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

Really? *A* clearance? I have family members much older than him, who sweated through the full SSBI or Full and TS/SCI process. It’s an 8-15 month trip. This wildly bigoted and troubled not-an-exemplary kid’s religion has nothing to do with the process.  Regardless, we all know (or with any science background, darn well should know ) 19–ish year old teenage brains have not matured. The last part of the brain to mature is the frontal cortex. Where good judgement, self-control, social skills, and decision-making skill come from. So yeah. Not arguing about the drinking or voting age, or recruitment age. I do think it’s playing with fire to put “scores” of 19-21 year olds fresh out of high school into positions with full access to SCIFs material and entry into the JWICS. With no ability or program to monitor the changes these 19 year olds go through on their way to actual biological maturity. What could go wrong? BTW, anyone think he never spouted off about his government conspiracy racist fantasies to anyone anywhere else?

Lastly, the US.military is sufficiently large to revise and assign this critical responsibility to an age appropriate rank and paygrade. The number of slots is “scores”, not “hundreds”. Do we really need to gamble like this? No. While of course it’s no silver bullet, it’s a LOT easier than trying to institute some sort of Total Big Brother real time microscope on every minute of people’s lives.

‘The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions”... and… “The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s.” https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-7-things-to-know

Ok, well you are not wrong, but you really are.  Lemme try and illuminate without straying too far into it.

Older people have baggage.  It is called life.  And as such they have a lot more possible security clearance issues than someone who has only been alive for 19 years.  So, yes, the your friends should be “sweating” because they have the things that trip up a clearance…like debt.  A 19 year old kid, not so much.  They are clean slates in many ways.  Beyond the whole constitutional and legal implications of age discrimination, if we filtered them out based on age and experience we are seriously cutting into recruiting…we need them, you might even have noticed a tv ad or two to that effect?

As to brain development.  Again, totally accurate assessment…and also why we recruit them.  That partially developed mind can be constructed and shaped for warfare…tale as old as time.  We can wring hands about security clearances but in reality we recruit them to kill.  We put a lot of firepower in their hands and expect them to be ready to employ deep judgement under fire on the use of lethal force.  “But what about the chain o command”?!  Well trust me when I say that adult supervision is probably the second casualty of war.  These kids survive a few months and they are the adult supervision.  These are the kids who fight and die in your nations wars…exactly how did you think the entire thing was getting done?

So when we are talking technology, here is a crazy truth you missed on brain development - old people brains are as slow and dumb as rocks.  So we purposefully recruit sharp (money on the bar this kid had a high IQ) kids who grew up with this stuff to run networks and all that “computer stuff”.  Cyber operators, the guys who are actually conducting ops in the main are in the same age category.  This is good because they can relate to the rifleman who they graduated schools with.  Anyway, these kids can collapse a national economy so they too are cleared just as high, and likely much easier than their 40 year old boss who is on his third marriage and has a bunch of traffic tickets.

Finally as to religion, c’mon seriously?  Tell me how you think a devout Muslim would have faired in comparison?  The kid likely came up entirely clean with no extremist linkages - “oh look he is a middle class white kid who used racial slurs online”.  If that was a showstopper we may as well close shop right now.  Here is a shocker…he probably told a few dirty jokes too, heavens no!  From what we have seen on the news the kid is a poster child for a quick and easy clearance.  And how do we screen for “young, lonely and insecure” particularly after a pandemic?  I mean basically stop at “young”, and as I explained that would be a major problem.

Edited April 16, 2023 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

This is what I wrote about several days ago.  Age matters.  Just ask car insurance companies why they hit younger drivers with higher premiums until they are in their early 20s.  In fact, I looked it up and males pay higher premiums than females until they are about 30.  Why is this?  Well, it probably is related to the person that passed me about an hour ago.  Double yellow line in a dense downtown 25mph zone, but apparently the driver thought 45 was the speed limit so...

I don't think all males under 25 are crap and can't be trusted, but I do think that they should be presumed less reliable the younger they are.  That means monitoring until a degree of reliability is established.  19 and pretty much fresh in uniform?  I don't see how anybody could know how this kid would react to such responsibility.

Plus, WTF was he doing with access to these programs?  I've said it before, there is absolutely *NO* reason an IT guy needs unfettered, non-expiring access to the content.  If someone within the military establishment thinks this is the way it needs to be, then I think that person should be removed and someone who knows what they are doing put in his/her place.

Case in point -> this forum.  We are hosted by Invision and their IT folks have full access to the servers and software infrastructure, we do not.  However, we have full access to our forum (including stuff you guys can not see) and the IT guys *DO NOT*.  What is not viewable to you guys here is not viewable to them by default.  When there is a need for their IT guys to do something with our forum (troubleshooting an update or something else that went wrong) then we grant them access.  When their task is done, the access goes away and we go back to the default state.  There is absolutely no reason why secured government software needs to be less secure than an f'n BBS environment.

However, I presume the government systems do work as they should and that procedures, rather than technology, are to blame for this fiasco.

Steve

See my points on the age problem above.  And we truly are showing our Grey if we think there is a leap of maturity between 21 and 25 in this day and age.  The age thing is going to go nowhere for a lot of good reasons.  Finally before this fossil club gets too far into our own supply, just gonna leave this one here (he was 35 when it started by the way, and again a good Christian)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

As to the IT/access problem. That is likely where the most heat and light will be placed.  Now what was this kids actual job?  Was he sweeping up the server room floor or was he an admin?  If he was running an entire secure server architecture or on the team who does, then his access was probably pretty wide, hence the clearance.  I suspect they will be looking hard at this but they may run into unworkable solutions based on whatever we bought 10 years ago with respect to IT.

Everyone is looking for a reason right now because, uncertainty.  But the reality is entirely certain, the kid was human and no human system is going to be error free.  Only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead.  It is an embarrassment to be sure but this is really more good news than bad.  The kid blew up and out really fast, so tied off quickly. The kids was not an insider so really did not understand what he was looking at nor what to really look for.  He loudspeakered as opposed to running silent whispers which could have lasted years.  And he was not being managed as a foreign asset who again could have been a slow bleedout of critical info until his retirement.

In many ways it was better he was a dumb kid and not some disgruntled 50 year old who actually knew where the bodies are buried and how to really hurt us.  While at the same time working around the procedures he likely helped write back in the day.

[Letter from Prague]

Have we talked about this already?

Lady from US claimed to be Ukrainian from Donbass, shared orc propaganda, and tried (or succeeded?) to change her legal name so it fits her fake Ukrainian LARP persona?

What the f?

[Ales Dvorak]

 

[kevinkin]

I have access to the Times this morning:

In High School, Airman Charged With Leak Was Focused on the Military
Jack Teixeira grew up in a family with strong military ties, was quiet and somewhat awkward in high school and seemed, to some, unnervingly obsessed with war and guns.

Kailani Reis, 20, a high school classmate in Airman Teixeira’s graduating class, said that as a student, the airman expressed his interest in weapons often enough that she and some other students found it “unsettling” and avoided him. She said few of the former classmates she knew were surprised when he was arrested.

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

“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.”

According to some of the gamers who belonged to a small group created by Airman Teixeira on the social media site Discord, he liked to play the apocalyptic zombie game Project Zomboid, as well as Arma 3, a tactical shooter game known for its lifelike attention to detail. He also liked to lecture the Discord group about the war in Ukraine and conflicts around the globe, sometimes typing for a half-hour at a time to share what he was learning from classified intelligence at work.

This is what I was thinking this week:

One group member told The New York Times that the briefings were largely ignored by the group, so Airman Teixeira, in frustration, started posting photos of actual classified materials. Those materials were later shared on other online platforms, eventually attracting the attention of federal authorities, who arrested him at gunpoint at his home on Thursday.

He wanted to impress those holed up on Discord. 

At a Pentagon briefing on Thursday, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman, addressed concerns about Airman Teixeira’s age, noting that the military routinely gives young people tremendous responsibility.

“Think about a young combat, you know, platoon sergeant, and the responsibility and trust that we put into those individuals to lead troops into combat,” he said. “You receive training and you will receive an understanding of the rules and requirements that come along with those responsibilities, and you’re expected to abide by those rules, regulations and responsibility. It’s called military discipline. And in certain cases, especially when it comes to sensitive information, it also is about the law.”

To compare the two is way out of bounds. The kid never received any training that develops a backbone. Training that make the student understand their are consequences for actions. In most years, more service members are hurt in training accidents than in combat. That makes all involved in the exercise think twice and act with responsibility since someone's life is in their hands. It's good the kid had a technical job. Better than confusing old people at Best Buy. But IMHO he needed to be getting a degree to push himself out into the world and aspire toward something other than mom's cooking and a bedroom to Discord in. Idle hands are the devil's workshop. A bored unchallenged kid. Thankfully he did not work in a bioweapons lab as a grad student. But maybe we do a better job protecting against those leaks than boring old IT leaks. 

Edited April 16, 2023 by kevinkin

[beardiebloke]

1 hour ago, Ales Dvorak said:

 

Some pretty wild conspiracy theories there.  App looks pretty cool though.

[hcrof]

22 minutes ago, beardiebloke said:

Some pretty wild conspiracy theories there.  App looks pretty cool though.

Yeah, it kinda sold me on the app - seems pretty good! 

I can't see how using an antiquated soviet bureaucracy which is rife with corruption could ever be better than a transparent online system modelled on a successful application in Estonia, and has survived everything the Russians can throw at it for years? But conspiracies...

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/world/asia/brazil-china-russia-ukraine.html

 

Quote

“Brazil as a country is more and more in line with the Chinese narrative,” said Moritz Rudolf, a specialist in China’s foreign policy at Yale Law School.

Mr Teixeira, was a vey naughty boy, and is going to have the misfortune to pay his bill in full. However very little of what he leaked, at least in regard to Ukraine surprised any regular reader of this board. Brazil edging, perhaps more than edging, towards Putin and Xi is a real problem.

 

 

[Beleg85]

Refurbished Ukrainian T-64- changed into armoured tractor, with turret taken out and reacive armour applied as God commanded.