The planet has become a very insecure place, where it is impossible to keep a secret, because security has more holes than the Swiss Emmental. Günter Grass wrote The Tin Drum in the middle of the Cold War and slipped this sentence into its pages: “Today I know that everything spies on us, that nothing goes unnoticed and that even the wallpaper on the walls has a better memory than menâ€.
Those were the days when spies wore hats and trench coats and bugged black Bakelite phones. Currently, kids with sneakers play in their chats to pass confidential documents to show that they know how to find state secrets in the most encrypted computers. For them, life is a video game and their ideology does not go beyond four racist or anti-Semitic slogans.
This Thursday, the FBI was able to arrest the suspect in a massive leak of classified Pentagon documents and search his home in the state of Massachusetts. The person arrested is Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old who worked in the intelligence department of the National Guard and who has been accused of having eliminated, retained and transmitted secret national defense information without authorization.
This documentation has gone around the world in the last ten days, after it appeared on Russian Telegram channels and was published in The New York Times. In these papers one could read, for example, the bad prospects for the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the spying of the United States on allied countries, such as Ukraine itself, Israel, South Korea or Egypt.
It all started in a group of teenagers with access to an online gaming platform, where one of them, who identified himself as OG, shared top secret photos, documents and videos taken from the US military base where he was employed. Joe Biden has wanted to downplay the leaked information, although he stated that he was concerned about the leak. But the rest of the world understood the high degree of defenselessness in our lives, when a boy is capable of sneaking into the Pentagon’s computers to poke chest with his friends.
