The unbearable lightness of secrets

By Jason Lim

The recent U.S. intelligence leak that triggered tortured handwringing in Korea over "Should we get angry at the U.S. or not for spying on us?" is as immature as it is irrelevant to the real significance of the incident. The case of Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents to friends on a gaming server, represents two new phenomena in the old world of cloak and dagger.

As Charles Savage in The New York Times writes, "Based on the charging documents in his case, Airman Teixeira does not appear to have been acting as a foreign agent, differentiating him from classic spying cases. He also does not appear to have been acting as a whistle-blower or otherwise trying to educate the general public by sharing secrets with the news media for publication, making his case different from another sort that has become more common in the 21st century. He also does not fit a third category of past cases of mishandling classified information: the hoarder."

Then, what motivated Teixeira to leak a trove of top-secret intelligence assessments about the war between Russia and Ukraine to a group of chatroom compatriots? He wanted to show off to his buddies in his chatroom.

According to news reports that interviewed his fellow chat members on the Discord platform ― many of them teenagers who shared a common interest in "guns, military gear, and God" ― Teixeira was the kingpin of their tightly knit community, looming large with his authority and access to secrets. Information is power. The more secretive the information, the more power and authority he will garner through judicious release of the said information, finally becoming the alpha male that all young men yearn to be.

Tom Nichols, in The Atlantic article titled, "The Narcissism of The Angry Young Men," labels these young men as the lost boys: "they are man-boys who maintain a teenager's sharp sense of self-absorbed grievance long after adolescence … Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed until they explode."

So, Teixeira leaked highly secret intelligence to his community because he was an immature young man who wanted to show off. The motivation is as mundane as it is ubiquitous. What 21-year-old boy doesn't want to increase his in-group status by showing off that he knows super secrets about the biggest news event in the world, especially if his interest tends to run towards guns and violence? Without deeper meaning to one's motivation, how do you even stop such things from happening? The unbearable lightness of everything that's symptomatic of today's world has even infected the intelligence community.

The second "new" thing about this leak was that it happened inside a closed chatroom on a platform catering to closed, private chatrooms. If Web 2.0 was all about showing off your content to everybody on whatever social media platform, we have transitioned our online interactions to closed, members-only chatrooms that amplify the echo chamber of our biased and preconceived worldview until it becomes all-encompassing and seamless, oblivious to both critical thinking and external modulation. Monitoring such internet subcultures based on closed chatrooms on fringe platforms has always been a challenge to law enforcement and national security experts. These are fertile grounds for right-wing, male-centric youth cultures prone to believing in government conspiracy theories, largely invisible to the authorities until one of them acts out on his beliefs usually in an act of kinetic violence. According to Time, "Teixeira appears to have reveled in leading a small community where young men, many of them teenagers, gathered to talk guns and religion, swap racist memes, discuss world events, and express anti-government sentiments marked by references to Waco and Ruby Ridge."

The lesson learned here is that the whole intelligence regime of obtaining, analyzing, sharing and, especially, keeping national secrets has to be reviewed for its relevancy and effectiveness as the world changes. The systems and safeguards in place ― designed and implemented during the Cold War ― don't make sense in today's world with today's intelligence workers familiar with today's technology and social norms catering to conspicuous superficiality.

Reading about Teixeira, what struck me as funny is that I was reminded of the overreaction that some young Korean men seem to have against the pinch motion formed by the index finger and the thumb. Remember that? An innocent motion that we use every day interacting with our smartphones supposedly mocks the supposed small size of Korean men's penises. Some Korean young men's overreactions to the pinch symbol recapped for me the utter fragility of the young, Korean male ego. Actually, it's more than fragility. It borders on a collective persecution complex, not unlike the lost boys that Nichols writes about.

Today's Korea is filled with Jack Teixeiras. How one may manifest himself will be different. However, what might be going on under the covers of Kakao, Line, Signal, Telegram and other chatrooms in Korea will undoubtedly be shocking and concerning.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.