Look, the feds just put the handcuffs on this 21-year-old kid named Jack Teixeira, a cyber specialist with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Why? Because this man was allegedly posting actual, highly classified Pentagon documents on a Discord server called "Thug Shaker Central" just to show off to his online crew. This is a massive, embarrassing L for the United States government, and it shows that the whole system is completely messy.

To understand how wild this is, you gotta look at how they used to do things back in the day. During World War I, back in 1917, the British had to put their absolute smartest codebreakers in a spot called "Room 40" to decipher the Zimmermann Telegram. This was a super-secret coded message where the German foreign minister told his diplomat that they were going to start unrestricted submarine warfare and wanted to hook up with Mexico. They even promised Mexico they'd help them "reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona" if the U.S. jumped into the war. In his 1967 book "The Codebreakers," David Kahn wrote: "Never before or since has so much turned upon the solution of a secret message."

Back then, the Germans were doing the absolute most to keep their business quiet, and the British had to sweat to crack it. But flash forward to 2023, and the Pentagon's biggest secrets are just falling out of the sky because some 21-year-old kid in the National Guard can just copy-paste them onto a gaming chatroom. The difference between real-deal codebreaking and some kid uploading PDFs on Discord is crazy, showing how lazy the system has gotten.

And here is the kicker: the government has over one million people walking around with Top Secret security clearances. One million! That means any young kid doing a short stint in the military can get his hands on papers that could literally start or end a war. It is wild to think that the keys to the kingdom are being handed out like candy to anyone who signs up.

Brett Bruen, who used to be a diplomat in the Obama administration, spoke on this and kept it 100. He said the Pentagon is trying to lock down who gets to see these secrets now, but he asked the real question: "Why do so many people, especially those working short stints in government, have access to information that can shape the fate of nations and their leaders?" He's right—why are they giving rookies the power to mess up the whole game?

Meanwhile, you got these policy folks in the Financial Times trying to spin the block and act like everything is fine. Kori Schake wrote that there is "some good news" because these leaks aren't actually huge surprises. She pointed out that journalists already knew Ukraine was running low on ammo, that peace talks with Russia weren't happening anytime soon, and that our allies already know the U.S. is out here eavesdropping on them.