Jack Teixeira, Edward Snowden, and plugging intelligence leaks

In 2013, after National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked highly classified data to the press, the intelligence community started plugging its computer ports.

Mr. Snowden had copied the data onto a thumb drive. So the intelligence agencies took enormous effort to cork their computers’ USB slots.

“They fixed that problem,” says Glenn Gerstell, National Security Agency general counsel from 2015 to 2020, of the USB drives. “But ... we were fighting the last war.”

Ten years later, National Guard Airman Jack Teixeira – an information technology worker at a base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – is accused of leaking hundreds of documents