Federal agents on Thursday arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira for allegedly distributing classified information that eventually made its way into the press. Unlike other leakers or whistleblowers, according to what we know so far, it doesn’t appear that Teixeira shared secrets about Ukraine’s military or America’s spying on its allies to make any sort of political point, or even to make a few dollars on the side. He apparently did it to look cool for his internet friends, who were “united by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God,” as The Washington Post put it.
According to the criminal complaint against him, Teixeira had access to classified documents thanks to his role in the Air National Guard, which required him to obtain a “top secret” security clearance. That such a young person was granted access to classified networks has sparked a debate in Washington. The real issue, though, isn’t his youth — it’s that so many people are needed to sift through the mountain of information that the U.S. classifies every year.
It’s no secret that there’s simply too much material that’s unnecessarily classified on a regular basis.
Since it became known that Teixeira is a white, Christian male, we’ve seen the likes of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to leap to his defense. The latter’s move prompted former Rep. Liz Cheney to call for Greene to be stripped of her own security clearance. Greene “cannot be trusted with America’s national security information,” Cheney declared. But while Cheney has a point, there are a lot of people in the government who need to lose their clearances — not because they’re untrustworthy but because it shouldn’t be necessary for them to have one.
It’s no secret that there’s simply too much material that’s unnecessarily classified on a regular basis. Some classified materials contain major state secrets, yes, but there’s also plenty of innocuous information that…
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