The Pentagon Leaks Scandal Shows We Are All At the Mercy of Young Techies
Technology empowers a new class of workers
As soon as we learned who the leaker of the latest dump of embarrassing classified information was, people asked themselves “how could a 21 year old have access to this much top secret information?”. I instinctively knew the answer: computers.
Computers, in theory, allow for better data protection. After all, information can be stored under the strongest possible encryption, with multiple levels of security, two factor authentication, and access logs. Gone are the days when someone could leave a facility, often undetected, with documents. Indeed, there’s something quaint about the recent scandal of President Trump (and, it turns out, President Biden and Vice President Pence as well) having physical classified documents in a residence. Because that’s not how modern secrets are usually kept.
But computers have a key vulnerability, which is that confidential information is generally utilized by a bunch of older decisionmakers who didn’t study computer science in college and do not know how to maintain or operate a computer system. Meanwhile, the group of people who do are often very young, may have their own agendas, and have had little indoctrination into the culture of confidentiality.
The Pentagon leaks are the most dramatic illustration of this. But this could have literally happened to almost any organization that maintains secrets. For instance, in the corporate world, secret information is maintained on computer servers, with significant access controls. Do you know who can bypass those information controls? The IT guys. They have access to everything- they have to! After all, someone has to be able to keep they system working, and that requires being able to enter the system for maintenance or support purposes.
Similarly in 2023, most law firms maintain their secret lawyer-client communications (which mostly take the form of e-mails) inside an information system, accessible only by the lawyers— and by the IT department, which, again, needs to keep the system working for the relatively older, less tech-savvy lawyers who use it.
It isn’t just secrets, as well. So many of the recent media scandals have been punctuated by the observation that many of the employees that handle the tech side of media and entertainment companies are very liberal and woke. The tech employees are often pushing the New York Times or Netflix to engage in cancel culture. And they have lots of power, because entertainment is increasingly delivered through technology and their labor is necessary to ensure the technology works the way it is supposed to and delivers the content.
And who are these techies? Well, experts in the latest computer technologies tend to be very young because they are the people who have learned the latest forms of the technology. And coders tend to be young as well because the work is repetitive and intense and burnout is quick. Further, because their background is in computer science, and STEM more generally, they often do not have a deep background in the cultures of the professions they work within. The IT guys at law firms, for instance, are surely told by their employers that the information on the servers is secret, but it isn’t as though they went to law school and were steeped in an education as to the sanctity of the lawyer-client privilege and the work product doctrine and the duties of secrecy to clients.
And while the vast majority of these people maintain the secrets they are entrusted with, because information is concentrated and they can access it all, all it takes is one person from among the great multitudes to leak enormous amounts of information. We saw this with Edward Snowden, with Reality Winner, and now with Jack Teixeira.
With respect to the woke stuff, one person is not enough, but even there, tech people punch above their weight, because even a moderately sized group of them could seriously impede the operations of just about any media company.
The knotty thing about this is there really isn’t a solution to it. The world runs on information technology, and we need experts to maintain it, as it would be incredibly inefficient and basically impossible to place the responsibility for maintenance of these systems with the older users who have little formal education in computers or software. In a world full of information, the people in IT wield the power. It’s the dystopian science fiction fantasy that no writer ever thought about, but it’s all too real.