U.S Defence department has announced plans to tighten protection for classified information.
In a memo released on Wednesday, July 5, 2023, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered all of the department’s secured rooms where classified information is kept and accessed to be brought into compliance with intelligence community standards for oversight and tracking.
The modifications require increased levels of physical security, additional controls to ensure documents are not improperly removed, and the assignment of top-secret control officers to monitor users.
Austin added that the sensitive compartmented information facilities, also known as SCIFs, must be monitored to prevent the use of electronic devices inside the rooms. That effort would include “appropriate electronic device detection systems and mitigation measures” inside the secure areas, the memo stated.
The announced changes are as a result of the explosive leaks of hundreds of intelligence documents that were accessed through security gaps at a Massachusetts Air National Guard base.
Airman 1st Class Jack Texeira, 21, is accused of leaking highly classified military documents in a chatroom on Discord, a social media platform that started as a hangout for gamers.
According to authorities, Teixeira, who enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2019, began disseminating military secrets first by typing out classified documents and later by removing classified documents from the base and taking them home to photograph them.
Teixeira worked as a “cyber transport systems specialist,” essentially an IT specialist responsible for military communications networks, which gave him wide access to the military’s classified computing networks.
Teixeira pleaded not guilty last month to federal felony charges.
In a briefing with reporters on the new directives, a senior defense official disclosed that the case highlighted the potential vulnerabilities the department faces as it works to safeguard classified information at military facilities across the globe that have varying security procedures and layers of protection.
Court filings in Teixeira’s case revealed that Air National Guard supervisors warned him at least three times about improper access to classified information. However, no further action to restrict his clearance or access was taken.
The official divulged that one of the concerns the department discovered in its review was that facilities that were farther from the headquarters had ambiguity on some of the military’s classified information policies, such as when a security violation was required to be reported higher up the chain of command.
Austin Calls For More Ways To Communicate Concerns
Also, Austin directed the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to develop ways to quickly flag and communicate concerns to local commanders about personnel.
These include improving how “continuous vetting information”; any updated reports on criminal records, credit reports or other indicators that are tracked as part of background checks, can be more quickly shared to flag a potential security risk.
A 2017 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed that an estimated 4 million people hold U.S. security clearances. Of those, roughly 1.3 million are cleared to access top-secret information.
The Defense Department has previously been criticized for delays vetting new employees for security clearances and for over-classifying information.
Officials have tried to balance those concerns against efforts to come up with ways to better protect the documents without further slowing down needed access to information, the official said.
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