Clive Williams | Why do vetted individuals leak information?

Teixeira has been arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act and unauthorised removal and retention of classified documents. He allegedly removed a hundred or more documents and disclosed them on a Discord server. There has been some public surprise that a seemingly immature and junior member of the US military had access to such a range of highly classified material.

The freer access situation came about largely as a result of a finding after Operation Desert Storm that operational military personnel did not have access to key intelligence relevant to their missions. After that, the system loosened up to give more people more access to top secret information.

It did tighten up a bit following the case of Chelsea Manning - but more so to prevent the unauthorised downloading of intelligence data as Manning had done. (In 2010, Manning downloaded nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents onto a CD-RW and passed them on to Wikileaks.)

Problems with people who have been security cleared are not uncommon. The vetting process is an imperfect tool. The level of investigative intrusion depends on the level of clearance.

At the top secret level (during my time in intelligence and security) there were two types of top secret vetting: "negative" and "positive". The main difference being that a positive vet sought out people who were not cited by the applicant but would normally be expected to be a referee (like previous employers).

While the focus in the Texeira case has been on top secret material, top secret is not the highest level of sensitive information. Beyond top secret there is "sensitive compartmented information" or SCI.

This is an area of much more restricted access, sometimes limited to a set number of people who have a "need-to-know". There can also be distribution restrictions, such as noforn (no foreign access) or austeo (Australian eyes only).

For one sensitive compartment that I managed, the US allocated Australia only a limited number of "billets" for people to be briefed into the system. There was keen competition among senior bureaucrats and ministers to have the clearance, mainly for prestige reasons. This limited the number of billets available to operators who needed the access. When I worked in the US in the early 1990s, there were 16 compartments above top secret, of which Australia had access to six.

Ironically when I first visited National Photographic Interpretation Center, which was part of CIA, I was greeted by the director who said he had looked forward to me coming and a program of briefings had been arranged. I sat through a couple of hours of detailed briefings into compartments that I had not been aware of, and then went back to my office at the Australian embassy.

In the afternoon, I got a flurried call from the NPIC branch head who had briefed me to say he had confused me for the new British liaison officer and I had been briefed into areas Australia wasn't supposed to know about.

He asked me to forget what I had been told. I did as he asked, which stood me in good stead when later that year Australia became part of the Operation Desert Storm Coalition, and the compartments were opened up to Australia. My preparedness to keep a secret indicated to my American interlocutors that I had integrity and could be trusted to safeguard US intelligence.

In the Five-Eyes intelligence community, much of the sharing and assistance between intelligence analysts and agencies is based on personal trust.

In recent years, there has been pressure on vetting agencies not to deny access to applicants. The wheel has turned full circle in this regard.

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When I was first involved in vetting in 1969 in MI-11, it was normal to deny access if there was the slightest security doubt about an applicant. I recall one person being denied access because he named his boat "Red Star". (The main concern at the time was communist infiltration.) People who had been denied access were often not told the reason.

Another "red flag" case involved an army officer who parked in a street where regular Thursday night meetings of the Australian Communist Party were held. He was not parked there on other nights. It turned out later that he visited his mother living in the same street on Thursday nights and had no association with the Communist Party. Today it is difficult to deny a security clearance, particularly if "inclusivity" issues are involved - which might make the vetters seem biased against an applicant on racial or other grounds.

Security clearances were supposed to be reviewed every five years, but that seldom happened unless there was a security reason to do so, mainly because of the huge backlog of new vets. It's not unusual for an initial top secret clearance to take 18 months, particularly if it's complicated and involves an applicant with multiple employments and overseas travel. (It used to be the case that the basic requirement for a top secret clearance was Australian citizenship and 10 years of checkable background.)

Why do people like Teixeira, who have successfully passed through the security clearance process, become a security problem in terms of unauthorised release of information?

For two main reasons: first, their attitudes may have changed since they were security vetted or, second, they have access to sensitive information and want to exploit it for personal reasons.

The most common reason for attitude change is disenchantment with their employer or organisation and a desire to get back at "the system" for treating them unfairly.

Personal reasons might include: making money out of their access to classified material by selling it to interested parties; ideological reasons, like disenchantment with democracy or government policy; to support another party that does not have access to the information, like China or Israel; or - as apparently was the case with Teixeira - to impress others with their privileged access.