Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Wikileaks and leakers Part II

Wikileaks is right out there, making the world safe for democracy by publishing 400,000 secret US Army field reports. The reports, filed by junior officers after action, some times describe intelligence sources, name Iraqi informers and describe Iraqi Army prisoner treatment that makes the Marquis de Sade look like a pussy cat.
A treacherous US Army enlisted man is responsible for sucking all this stuff off Army computers and passing it to Wikileaks.
In the old days, 400,000 reports would be on paper and kept in GI steel safes, the kind with the user hostile combination lock. Carrying that much classified out the door without being noticed was impossible. But now we got automation, the reports are all kept on disk and anyone with a password can sweep them onto a flashdrive and be gone. So number 1 mistake was putting this stuff on computers in the first place. Windows computers are so insecure, you might as well publish the classfied on the base bulletin board as put in on disk.
Second mistake is keeping it. Back when I was serving my country, we had a January ritual. Every January we cleaned out the classified from the safe and changed the safe combination. Junior commissioned officers (like me) were required to haul the out dated classified up to the base power plant and heave it into the furnace. This was Duluth Minnesota, and the base power plant ran a huge coal furnace to heat the whole base. Any classified more than a year old I burned. And signed each one off as destroyed on our classified documents inventory.
Finally, the Army seems to have forgotten about compartmentalization. This one enlisted traitor should never have had access to that much stuff. His pass word should have been limited to just stuff from his unit, not everything in every unit over all of time.

No comments: