DIGITAL BLIND SPOT

The U.S. government's security-clearance process is struggling to keep up online

- VERA BERGENGRUEN

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.”