All posts tagged "Losing Track"

Raw Story investigative reporter Alexandria Jacobson and Editor-in-Chief Dave Levinthal today won a 2023 Best in Business Award for their ongoing "Lawmakers, Law Breakers" series that's revealed how dozens of members of Congress have violated a federal law designed to stop insider trading and curb conflicts of interest.

The award, sponsored by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, comes in the contest's personal finance category.

Judges wrote of the "Lawmakers, Law Breakers" series: "In this well-executed investigation, Alexandria Jacobson and Dave Levinthal reveal that 37 members of Congress failed to properly disclose personal stock trades in just one year. Their dogged reporting effort raises important questions about the adequacy and policing of financial conflict-of-interest laws designed to give Americans confidence in their lawmakers’ impartiality."...

When news broke that 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard airman Jack Teixeira leaked defense documents on the social network Discord, experts and concerned citizens alike began questioning who vetted this low-level service member who potentially caused grave damage to national security.

The Teixeira saga, which will likely play out for years to come across courtrooms, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, laid bare how a troubled young man with extremist tendencies needed only a computer and reliable home internet to disseminate government secrets.

But on a more fundamental level, Teixeira’s leaks represent just the dramatic, final failure of an enfeebled national security vetting system that struggles at times to weed out extremists — even when online warning signs are available — and to track which employees have access to classified information at all....

At the dawn of former President Donald Trump’s administration, government employees and contractors in need of security clearances could wait years for approval. Federal agencies stared down a backlog of 700,000 clearance investigations starting in 2017.

For one former senior-level State Department employee, who is a person of color, they waited more than two years to get approved for a top secret clearance.

When the Trump administration arrived, many new Trump officials received “interim security clearances” because they didn’t initially meet standard security requirements, the former employee told Raw Story. This contributed to a screening backlog. ...

“High-risk.”

That’s how the U.S. Government Accountability Office — an internal watchdog for the federal government — has classified the nation’s security clearance vetting process for the past five years.

The latest report to Congress dropped amid several national security threats from current and former government employees this year alone: 21-year-old airman Jack Teixeira leaked defense documents on a gaming social media site; a jailed neo-Nazi Marine Corps vet allegedly saved classified materials on his computer; a former FBI analyst was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for retaining defense documents in her home....