Thursday 13 April 2023

FBI close in on document leaker suspect

So Biden was right when he said in Ireland that investigators were getting close to identifying the person responsible for leaking more than 100 classified documents to a social media platform. According to the New York Times the suspect is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. It's just bizarre that comparative youngsters are given access to such highly classified documents. And why would a national guardsman, if it is him, need to have access to documents which are supposed to have been drawn up for the benefit of senior military officers and Pentagon civilians involved in dealing with the war in Ukraine? Ok, this bloke identified by name by the newspaper, worked for the intelligence branch of the National Guard but is he intimately engaged in advising/assessing/analysing secrets related to the war? Perhaps he is or was. But this revelation, if accurate, yet again underlines the risks entailed in letting so many thousands of people have access to top secret material. You would have thought that lessons might have been learnt from the Bradley Manning story. Private First Class Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning was working for an intelligence unit of the US Army in Iraq when he handed over more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. When he was arrested in May, 2010, he was a mere 22. So it really is a question of, here we go again.

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