I’m sure by now that everyone has read about/been bombarded with the news of a junior enlisted Air Force National Guard member leaking classified documents. In case yo haven’t, Fox News has the tale.

Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking documents the Department of Defense says contain “sensitive and highly-classified material,” was charged Friday with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents.

In my past life I spent a lot of time working around classified information. There are a few things about this story that seem weird to me. I’ll just drag you through my thought process.

First, he had access to a SCIF. There isn’t anything magical about this part, more people than you think have access to lots of info. The vast majority of it is boring, meaningless drivel that is simply overclassified to ensure no one gets in trouble. Unclassified information gets elevated all of the time as a sort of bureaucratic safety measure.

Then, he had to get the information out of the SCIF. This is where all sorts of alarms and whistles should be going off.  If he was able to get his phone in there, then a lot more people than just him should be getting fried. The security officer for starters. A thumb drive wouldn’t work on a secured computer. Having a printer sitting there willy nilly to reproduce anything from that network is nutso. If (a big if) anything was allowed to ever be printed, it should have been watched by a security officer, and immediately given a control number, which would be logged and tracked until it was destroyed.

This is the issue I had with all of Hillary’s emails. In order to get classified info from a classified system to an unclassified one requires a major breach. You can’t just email it from the secret sauce bowl to the unsecret one. You have to physically move it. It isn’t something you  can say “Oops” about. Those systems do not ever talk to each other.

After the info was purloined, it wouldn’t be much more to get it out. Searches are sometimes done, but rarely, so the hard part would be over.

The next question would be to ask why that sort of information would be at an ANG base. There isn’t a top secret Google where you can search for “really interesting shit to show my friends.” That stuff gets sent to specific email accounts, or posted on specific boards where only required people should have access. A junior enlisted guy having that access is pretty fishy.

I’m not implying a conspiracy here, but I am saying that there were many security wires tripped here for this guy to get the goods. I think this guy’s commanding officer is pretty worried about now.