The fallout from the Jack Teixeira discord leaks is still rolling on this weekend. Despite everyone in the MSM seemingly agreeing how terrible it all is and how this information has “no business being out in public,” the contents of the classified documents continue to make the rounds. Some of it was potentially damaging while other tidbits were mostly just embarrassing for the White House. The latter is particularly true of the details showing how frequently the U.S. has been spying on its allies and how things on the battlefield in Ukraine really aren’t going as swimmingly well as we’ve been told. Is this causing any uncomfortable moments at the State Department? Not according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He’s confident that our allies and partners are just fine with all of this. (NY Post)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday that the leak of reams of top-secret intelligence documents online has not hampered cooperation between the US and its global allies and partners.

“We have engaged with our allies and partners since these leaks came out, and we have done so at high levels, and we have made clear our commitment to safeguarding intelligence and our commitment to our security partnerships,” the country’s top diplomat told reporters in Hanoi.

To be fair to Blinken, a lot of the “juicier” looking stories really are just business as usual in the intelligence community. This was a case of someone airing out our dirty laundry, but the laundry has been there all along and all of our partners do the same thing. As I’ve mentioned here previously, everyone spies on everyone all of the time, including the United States and our allies. Everyone knows it’s happening but they try to avoid talking about it so as not to create too many awkward moments at the next cocktail party.

What I continue to find more interesting are the underlying mechanisms in the way this story is evolving. Keep in mind that it was the New York Times and the Washington Post that actually tracked down and identified Jack Teixeira before our own intelligence agencies could. Then, after decrying what a terrible thing had taken place, the papers began shuffling out the contents of the classified documents. Glenn Greenwald noticed this recently and pointed it out on social media.

Look what's going on here:

First the NYT (jointly with CIA-front Bellingcat) and WPost hunted down, exposed and ensured the arrest of the 21-year-old leaker.

Now they're having a party with the docs, publishing one "EXCLUSIVE" after the next as if they bravely "obtained" them: pic.twitter.com/Izqn5mtXHq

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2023

We have some significant problems inside of America’s intelligence community and they existed long before anyone had ever heard of Teixeira and his gaming buddies. He’ll probably wind up doing a significant stretch behind bars, but that doesn’t solve anything. Teixeira was a symptom, not the actual disease. If someone that new to the game had that level of access to secret material, we’re almost certainly missing a lot of other leaks and exposures involving people smart enough not to get caught.

But then, our entire system of classification and national security is a hot mess and it’s been exposed many times in the past. We classify literally billions of documents, the vast majority of which probably have no business being kept from the public. And once something is classified, you have to move heaven and earth to get it declassified and released. In most cases, that never happens. (We still have documents from World War One that are locked away in top-secret files.)

When it comes to documents that actually merit carrying some level of classification, we’ve just seen yet again how our intelligence agencies aren’t very good at keeping a handle on them. On top of this batch, you can add all of the documents that showed up at Mar-A-Lago, in Mike Pence’s house, and nearly every place that Joe Biden has ever slept or kept an office.

I regularly browse through a lot of government documents in the National Archives. Back in the 40s and 50s, most classified documents carried instructions to downgrade the classification level every three, five, or seven years until they were ready to review and make public if appropriate. But we had far fewer documents to deal with back then. Is there a way to do that today with billions of documents in the vault? Your guess is as good as mine, but I don’t expect to see it happen.