The Pentagon mentioned Wednesday it has tightened safety to maintain tempo with the rising variety of Defense Department amenities approved to retailer and course of categorized data and supply steering for the personnel who guard navy secrets and techniques.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in April ordered a Pentagon-wide evaluate of safety procedures and insurance policies after Air National Guard Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, 21, was accused of leaking dozens of categorized and delicate intelligence paperwork in a chatroom on the Discord social media platform. He is being held in detention after pleading not responsible to 6 counts of espionage final month.

In a June 30 memo, Mr. Austin mentioned the Defense Department depends on a tradition of belief and accountability from those that are granted entry to Classified National Security Information — CNSI in Pentagon parlance.

While most Defense Department personnel deal with categorized materials appropriately, “the review identified areas where we can improve accountability measures to prevent the compromise of CNSI, to include addressing insider threats,” Mr. Austin wrote within the memo.

The deliberate adjustments to procedures embrace elevated ranges of bodily safety; extra controls to make sure paperwork aren’t improperly eliminated, and the task of top-secret management officers to watch customers who take care of categorized materials.

On Wednesday, a senior Pentagon official briefed reporters on background on the 45-day evaluate. She mentioned safeguarding categorized data will be difficult at navy amenities with a spread of safety procedures, from the Pentagon to the Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Mass. the place Airman Teixeira was assigned.

The Defense Department’s progress “has underscored the need to have a comprehensive and evolving security-in-depth posture,” the official mentioned. “We are no longer just talking about a small number of facilities primarily in intelligence community buildings.”

Following the Pentagon coverage evaluate, commanders will validate the necessity for his or her personnel to have entry to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) and be certain that these with a “need to know” have a legitimate non-disclosure settlement on file. It additionally directs the Defense Department to develop a centralized monitoring system for all places of work that maintain navy secrets and techniques.

“We needed to revalidate things like distribution lists and make sure we have appropriately modernized our requirements,” the Defense Department official mentioned.

In previous years, a service member with entry to categorized data may need gotten a safety clearance and that might have been the tip of it. Now, the Pentagon is stressing a course of known as “continuous vetting,” which includes usually reviewing a cleared particular person’s background to make sure they proceed to satisfy safety clearance necessities.

Following the evaluate, the Pentagon says it can work extra carefully with safety managers on the native stage to assist them monitor personnel who've entry to categorized data.

Mr. Austin additionally ordered safety officers on the Pentagon to offer him with quarterly updates on the progress of the safety evaluate.

Federal prosecutors mentioned Airman Teixeira, who labored as a cyber transport methods specialist on the Otis Air Guard base, started sharing navy secrets and techniques in January 2022, first by copying down categorized data and later transcribing it to the Discord web site. He later posted photographs to the social media platform that bore categorized markings like “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET.”

He was not stopped even after being reportedly warned about accessing data that had nothing to do together with his job. The leaks continued for greater than a yr till his arrest in April 2023, officers with the U.S. Attorney’s Office mentioned.

“Based on my training and experience, I know that to acquire his security clearance, Teixeira would have signed a lifetime binding non-disclosure agreement in which he would have had to acknowledge that the unauthorized disclosure of protected information could result in criminal charges,” an FBI agent wrote within the felony criticism filed towards him.

Airman Teixeira was indicted final month in Boston on six counts of willful retention and transmission of categorized data regarding the nationwide protection. He stays in federal custody after U.S. District Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy granted the U.S. authorities’s movement for detention. 

He is dealing with 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fantastic. 

An estimated 4 million folks maintain U.S. safety clearances, in line with a 2017 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Of these, roughly 1.3 million are cleared to entry top-secret data, the Associated Press reported.

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