 You've all now, I think, read about the defense leak, this leak of massive quantities of classified information on the Discord channel, leaks that came out of gaming groups on Discord that suddenly started publishing top secret and secret documents from the defense department. You know, in the beginning nobody really knew where this stuff was coming from. It took people a while to figure out where it was coming from and the extent of it. There are always all these disparate leaks about Ukraine and about Russia and then about Israel. And nobody quite knew what a make of it all. It ultimately turns out this afternoon, the FBI arrested a Massachusetts airman by the name of Jack Teixeira regarding the documents leaks. It turns out that he, I assume it's him, we don't have all the evidence yet, but I assume it was him, that he worked at the military base, had access to this top secret information, managed to somehow take photos of it. And then early this year started writing out, from the photographs, typing out what was in the photographs and distributing on his little Discord channel. It turns out that he has a Discord channel of teenagers and 20-somethings, most of them under 24, I think. People in the United States, but also overseas, Ukrainians, Russians, and from other places around the world. These were kids who, young people, all guys, as far as I can tell, enamored by this guy who had leaked information. He was some kind of guru to them and they were all gaga over what he had to teach them and tell them. And part of what, in order to keep himself respected by this group, in order to keep himself as the leader of this group, he started leaking out this information to show them, look how important I am, I have access to this top secret information. This is all on the Discord channel. These are not people I think who've ever met each other personally. And he started, so it's not like he had any kind of big motive to leak this information, some social agenda to leak this information, or working for some foreign government, as far as we can tell. So as you can tell, he did this to show off, basically. And then this small group which had this information then started leaking it on other Discord channels. After a while, he got tired of writing out or typing out what was actually in the photographs of the documents he had printed. So he just started posting photographs. And of course, those photographs led to the clues that are now getting him arrested. So I haven't read up the latest about everything we know about him and about, but there was a very good Washington Post article this morning. I think the Washington Post in some senses were maybe ahead of the FBI, where the Washington Post had interviewed some of the people on this Discord channel that had not yet been interviewed by the FBI. But it does look like about a couple of a few hours ago that the FBI had met at a rest and this guy is in jail. A couple of quick points on this that I've made in the past, but I think are worth repeating. One, there's too much top secret and secret stuff floating around that people have access to. I mean, presidents, vice presidents seem to be walking off with this stuff all over the place. Young national guard airmen have access to Pentagon secret documents that have to do with the Ukraine war and with the intelligence agencies assessment of what is going on in Israel. That's just bizarre. Why would anybody have access to this in a military base? I mean, this is intelligence that should be accessible by only people who need this intelligence. Clearly an airman in the national guard doesn't need this kind of intelligence. So something is fundamentally wrong with the way national security mechanisms are working in the way this information is being kept, this information is being distributed. Again, this comes on the heel of the fact that we discovered that politicians are just walking away with documents. I mean, you obviously had clearance, but once you have clearances, I mean, you have clearance for everything. It doesn't mean it's not siloed. Don't you have clearance for the stuff that's relevant for you? It just seems bizarre to me that this is so accessible and so easy and that it took the authorities so long to figure this out. And then the second issue is, which I've also talked about many times, and that is that there's just too much that is secret. And one of the things that came out of this is the extent to which the United States is spying on its allies, the extent to which we listen in on conversations of Israel's spy agency and Israel's politicians. And we know from Snowden that we listen in from leaks surrounding Snowden that we listen in on Angela Merkel. We know that we listen in on politicians and on defense department officials and others. We know that we listen in to all this stuff. I think we're probably spending way too much time spying on Americans and spying on our allies and not enough time and not enough focus and not enough, and this goes to a bigger point that I've made over and over again, not enough strategic focus on who our enemies are and who we need to be dealing with, who we need to be focused on, who we need to be accumulating information about because they truly are a threat to the United States. We thought that it's so wide that we lose the focus on the real enemy. We lose the focus on what the real problem is. I think I told you that I was at the NSA, spent a day at the NSA, this is years ago, this is after Snowden, about six months after Snowden revelations, and it was astounding to me the amount of intelligence the NSA accumulates about so many different things and how non-strategic they are. And maybe they're not the ones that should be strategic. Maybe it's just the fact that they get requests from the people above, from the people in the White House, requests that are not strategic and have nothing to do with a real focus on the national defense and the national security of the United States. But it is, there's too much information, there's too many secrets. The government should not be keeping so many secrets from us, and then these secrets are too easily accessible, too easily accessible. I guess Michael A. says, if you have top-secret clearance, you have clearance for everything. You know, I had top-secret clearance in Israeli intelligence. I had access to a lot of stuff, but I was in a particularly department responsible for a particular country, and the intelligence I had access to was on that particular country. And yeah, I guess I could ask for access to intelligence on another country. I'd have to show why it was relevant to what I was doing. But there's no way I could, I could just access, at least in those days, not so long time ago, I could access just broad intelligence that was top-secret, just because I happen to have top-secret clearance and was working on, in those days I was working on Jordan, right, and then I was working on Lebanon. But that didn't mean I had access on Egypt or I had access on Saudi Arabia or I had access on Iraq or Iran or something like that. It was top-secret in the context of what I was doing. He has an Amin in the National Guard. What does he need information about Israel, Ukraine, and all the other stuff that he released? There's no connection between them. So there's no, in other words, you shouldn't have regular access to stuff that is not immediately relevant for the things that you are working on. And yes, if you have top-secret clearance and you show a need to broaden your access, then it should be granted to you. But you should be able, you should have to show a need. Otherwise, there are too many people with too much access. And who can walk away with it? Take photographs on the iPhone and walk away. Supposedly when you go into a room with top-secret stuff, you're supposed to keep your iPhone out. You're supposed to not have a camera with you. So, I mean, there are massive failures here of security and I suspect that there are massive failures of security throughout the entire system and this is not the last or the least of the kind of security leaks that we have. These particularly security leaks were particularly helpful to the Russians because they involved some pretty important information about Ukraine, its plans and what was going on and Russia's benefit. Actually, one of these documents, I don't know if you saw this, it's just, it's kind of funny, but it tells you a little bit about how this all works. One of the documents that had to do with American estimates of casualties on the Ukrainian and Russian side, when it got distributed out there, one of these Russian propaganda, I don't know, entities out there took the document and then doctored it, reduced the number of casualties on the Russian side and increased the number of casualties on the Ukrainian side and redistributed it as if it was the original document. So, the Russians were using some of this just as their own propaganda to try to pretend that they're in better shape than they really are, but the real damage here was that certain secrets about Ukraine's plans for an offensive in the spring were revealed that certainly helped Russian intelligence, certain information about Ukraine's anti aircraft, anti air defenses was also leaked, which is going to have potentially a profound impact on Russia's ability to attack Ukraine. So, this was very helpful to the Russians and very harmful to the Ukrainians and that is incredibly unfortunate. Thank you very much for your announcement when we go live and for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.