Patel, a former federal prosecutor, said he does not believe “for a single second, this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran this operation alone.”
I have no opinion on whether he must have acted alone or not. I’ll just observe that just because a former Federal prosecuter (a lawyer) can’t imagine a way some kid could gain access to such information without help doesn’t mean it can’t be done. But who knows?
__________

A biographical rejoinder about Patel — besides assisting DNI director Grenell, — which illuminates the source that nonapod questions.

Kesh Patel is a lawyer who long did terrorist counter-intelligence as an FBI Special Agent. In short, Patel KNOWS because he’s been at the bottom and at the top of the Intel Info-space food chain or hierarchy. His experience reinforces his claims to substance and authoritative insight.

These are sound grounds for believing him. He’s got the wide-ranging exposure to secret federal information.

Bruce.
System administrators may be near to magic in their ability to roam the system, if we are getting the correct explanation.

But this is such a well known vulnerability. Back in the early 1980s, 40 years ago, I had a DOE Q clearance. At Sandia, when a disk containing classified information (typically related to nuclear weapons designs) was mounted, a red light was set flashing in the computer room, and Need To Know was imposed on the systems console. I could muck around with the systems internals at other times, but wasn’t allowed to linger in the computer room when that red light was flashing. My point is that even back then, the systems administrator vulnerability was known. And, my question, of why, in 2023, this vulnerability isn’t vigorously addressed.

But the invasion of Crimea and formenting civil war in the Donetsk basin in 2014 was mostly peaceful. Da?

He makes the point that the leaker’s generation, “born with a smartphone in their hand” blurs the digital reality and the physical reality– to them they are the same, which might explain some of the other pathologies culture is facing.

They spend some time talking about the oath the leaker had to take– and the fact oaths are almost meaningless to this generation, since they feel they are now able to escape consequences to life.

I don’t agree with his conclusions, but still a thoughtful conversation.

Martin Gurri: The Pentagon leak is only the beginning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvdM_VG6Abs

It’s the breadth of the take which interests me. Odd for a guy that young. If he’s trying to use this to out-count fellow rivet-counters in a video game, he wouldn’t be bothering wit ammo orders from South Korea.

It wasn’t that Patel was a federal prosecutor, but that he was speaking as the former deputy DNI, and right hand man to former DNI and Trump’s last NSA, Rick Grenell. When he was the one preparing the PDBs, he had to have had access to practically everything, and didn’t, which both Grenell and he have been pointing out a lot since Trump left office. There was a lot of classified information that turned out to have been withheld from Trump, Grenell, and Patel. BTW, this is likely why the FBI perjury trap was utilized in the first weeks of the Trump Administration to take out Gen Flynn, because he knew a lot of what was being hidden. Oh, and we found with the first Trump Impeachment that much of the missing intelligence involved Ukraine.

In any case, I think that what Patel was saying is that if he, Grenell, and Trump would have had a hard time getting this information, then there is no way that a low level enlisted Airman should have been able to get access to it. The corollary to that is that someone, or more likely someone’s, who had access to the information had to have fed it to him. One alternative, posed here, is that our system of protecting and maintaining classified information has a fatal weakness – system administrators. If, in 2023, that would be inexcusable. But then, we are dealing with a massive government bureaucracy…