The U.S. government’s security-clearance process is struggling to keep up online
BY VERA BERGENGRUEN The Brief is reported by W.J. Hennigan, Sanya Mansoor, Olivia B. Waxman, and Julia Zorthian
The Brief
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PRIVATE SECURITY IS REPLACING POLICE
IN NOVEMBER 2020, JACK TEIXEIRA WROTE A letter to the local police chief asking him to reconsider allowing him to own guns. The Dighton, Mass., police had denied the 18-year-old’s two previous requests for a firearms license, citing an incident when Teixeira was suspended for alleged violent and racial threats, including comments about guns at school.
This time, Teixeira’s pleas worked. As a newly minted member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, he had recently received a top-secret security clearance. “The investigation process was extremely thorough,” he wrote to the police chief, arguing that the U.S. government had deemed him qualified to become “a person that now has the national trust to safeguard classified information.”
That trust turned out to be misplaced. In April, Teixeira was arrested and charged with posting classified military documents online in the most damaging leak of U.S. intelligence in a decade, revealing sensitive information about the war in Ukraine and complicating relations with U.S. allies. Federal investigators also found that he had continued to regularly post “about violence and murder” in online forums, researched mass shootings, amassed an “arsenal” of weapons in his home, and asked for advice on how to turn an SUV into an “assassination van.”
Not surprisingly, these revelations have raised new questions about the U.S. government’s security-clearance process. For decades, the system has made judgments about whom to grant clearances based on the “whole person concept,” considering the “totality” of the person’s conduct in order to determine whether they pose an acceptable level of risk. The probe scrutinizes both personal and professional lives, from family relationships and interactions with foreigners to finances, mental health, sexual behavior, psychological state, past handling of protected information, and drug and alcohol use.
Social media would seem an obvious place to look. But unlike offline interactions, an applicant’s digital life—like social media posts or online groups they belong to—is not typically analyzed and is very rarely investigated, according to national-security legal experts and U.S. officials.
Dozens of cases in recent years have exposed the double lives led online by people
