DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff' A former US Army Sergeant with Top Secret US military clearance created a Word document entitled "Important Information to Share with Chinese Government," according to an FBI agent's sworn declaration. Joseph Daniel Schmidt, aged 29, was arrested on Friday in San Francisco after disembarking a flight from Hong Kong, officials …
Thank God he was part of the Human Intelligence squad !
Can you imagine his actions if he was just a basic grunt ? He might have posted secrets on a Minecraft forum !
Of course, he'd have to remember them first and, from what I read in the article, remembering things (like operational security, online stealth and spycraft basics) is not his strong point.
Yes. With some changed names and adjusted tech it sounds like one of those stories about the Soviets trying selling obvious bait to Abwer, them laughing it out out of the building, and then the Gestapo swallowing it with glee and gusto.
But ok, if what he did was direct troops to collect hard drives and USB sticks in combat zones then that kind of tradecraft would not have been his department.
"Among the alleged searches detailed in the court filing were:"
Good Lord. I write novels and if a search history can be held against you, I'm destined for the blackest of CIA dark sites.
Location of a Chinese embassy is nothing comparted to how to manufacture Sarin or build a crude, but operational, tactical nuke.
From story sounds like they were totally & utterly inept.
Two words: "US Army".
The various ex-squaddies I've worked with over the years have a uniformly low opinion of the US army - the prevailing opinion was that they were too reliant on shiny toys and had insuffient training in the business of actually being a proper functional soldier.
The US Marines were a different kettle of fish. Much closer to UK Marines in training and ethos.
The US Navy - polite laughter was the usual response.
Stupidity and intelligence are generally localized along certain branches. The more of your neural real estate is tied up in one specialty the less is available for anything else.
The more a person relates to the abstract fictions of bureaucracy, they're less able to relate to basic realities.
Longer a person enjoys the benefits of authorities fiction, the harder it is for them to remember that they're just another frail human existing at the mercy of their surrounding humans.
They may perceive themselves as untouchable having normalized harbor from natural consequence that tends to come as a privilege of rank.
The most alienated from reality can't acknowledge anything directly, and can only interact with the world indirectly through formal reports.
Perhaps having lived so entrenched in deep artificial abstraction so long they have lost touch with direct experience and physical consequence.
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There have been cases like that before.
Lee Harvey Oswald petitioned to live in the Soviet Union, and at first the Soviets figured he must be some kind of spy. Like a really bad and obvious plant, so they didn't allow him in for a good while. Think he snuck in and they deported him multiple times, but I could be conflating that part of the story with someone else.
I personally hope, though it seems like this may be a forlorn one especially with a few idiots in a certain political party wanting to defund the FBI, that anyone who is granted a security clearance is someone the FBI keeps tabs on for the remainder of their life. They don't need to be picking through their garbage or anything, but definitely monitoring for things like suspicious trips or communications with foreign officials. Though, the higher the clearance the person has/had, the more comprehensive the surveillance should be.
There are millions of people who have security clearances at any one time. There would be tens of millions of who have had a clearance at some point in their lives. Including me, I held a Top Secret clearance at one time (consulting on a project for a branch of the DoD) They would need a lot more FBI agents to do what would effectively be tracking behavior of 1/10th of the US population.
I wasn't personally exposed to any information that could cause damage to national security if it was exposed (the IP addresses of DoD hardware is classified Top Secret, that's the sort of "secrets" I had access to) If they could figure out which people have access to REAL secrets and which have access to overclassified garbage like I did, maybe the problem becomes more tractable.
Depending on the severity, that could just make it even harder to find people who want to do that kind of work in the first place. Government already frequently underpays its staff and puts restrictions on them that a different career option might get. That applies to all governments, but there have been several articles here specifically about the U.S. government failing to find the administrators and programmers that they want. Add in a "oh, and if you work on anything important you will have no privacy for the rest of your life" and that will probably not help their case. Especially with techs, you have to have some reason why they would choose a job in government over one somewhere else, and if you keep adding restrictions, the only answers that will be left are the applicant who accepts is a ridiculously patriotic person who will take any punishment for their beloved country, the applicant can't get a job anywhere else and now that the government can't find anyone qualified, they'll have to deal with them, or the applicant is a spy who is willing to take that job because it's the only way to get information.
I wouldn't work for a company that wanted the power to surveil me outside of work hours, or for that matter even during work hours if they went far enough. There's no chance I would agree to a lifetime of surveillance, even if I quit. If others are like me, maybe they'd have to do as at least one American military person suggested and start conscripting people with technical skills. I'm sure that will be popular.
You essentially agree to such surveillance by joining the military, so choosing to have that continue after you leave may not be as difficult a choice as you think. Someone who works with classified information in the military has a much easier path than those without a military background to similar jobs in the civilian world.
I mean, for my part I agree, I'd never want that. But I would also never want having someone able to order me to scrub latrines or stand guard in the rain all night either so I was never going to be cut out to join the military regardless.
And, for years, I've been seeing articles where the American military complains that they don't have enough people. This is sometimes generic and they don't have enough of any kind of person, but it also has explicitly included people with technology skills to the extent that I think I've seen two proposals to draft them. So yes, people do consent to that and other invasive things, but clearly not as many people as they would like to do so. Adding more onerous things will only make that problem worse, while easing up on some of them might help attract some of the people they want.
Cut him a break - he is clearly[1] an avid Pokemon player and was just trying to trade a Secret Rare (maybe even an Ultra Rare, given it apparently is only seen in special communities, like the SDCC). All he wanted was a chance to visit all those Pokemon GO gyms in the PRC!
[1] well, this makes more sense than his believing he was an effective defector
How did this person manage to get a security clearance in the first place? The FBI seems to be completely asleep at the switch here as this isn't even really an isolated example. There were at least three other examples just in recent months. Clearly there is a need to review and overhaul the process by which people are given security clearances. It also probably wouldn't hurt if we started paying US Military personnel a living wage so this sort of thing was at least slightly less appealing.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/21/it_help_desk_guy_arrested/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/04/us_navy_sailors_china_spies/
Quite possibly that spies, the real kind who have important information, can be highly rewarded by countries that want that information. If he had really interesting data about the U.S., maybe China would have happily given him a luxurious early retirement in one of the nicer parts of their country. Of course, it doesn't sound like he had much to offer. After all, I sometimes think how nice it would be if I didn't have to work for a company and could just write the code that interests me, but I'm smart enough to know that I'm unlikely to be the recipient of a bunch of free money, so it's probably a good idea for me to keep earning normally. I wouldn't assume that he saw some dark secret he wanted to escape, because someone like that tends to want to hide, not sell other things to a different government.
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