Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Military Leaks its Secrets Online

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-out-the-cia-myspace-page dept.

athloi writes "Detailed schematics of a military detainee holding facility in southern Iraq, geographical surveys and aerial photographs of two military airfields outside Baghdad and plans for a new fuel farm at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are among the items accidentally left online by government agencies and contractors."

3 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Keeping secrets by Aminion · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And somehow, these people manage to keep secrets about aliens, JFK, weapon programs, etc.? ;)

  2. Re:Is there no way to do better? by qzulla · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Is there any (operating) system out there with some sensible, security-aware data flow tracking? Such as 'when you copy something from a classified document into a non-classified document the non-classified one becomes classified'? Or attaching this kind of security information to files or other objects? I know that this is a major topic of research in computer science, but have never seen it in real use.

    I work in a class environment. I'll try to answer this.

    Why should the OS care? Who is going to build an OS that can determine what is class or not. That is the owner of the datas (data's?) job. The computer does not care. It happily does what it does - manage data. It is not its job to determine what is safe and what is not.

    That is for people to determine. In the end it is people who decide what goes where. I like it this way as there is some accountability and a paper (electronic) trail.

    So you write an app that determines what is class. Oops! The DB is down/not up to date/hosed by a virus. In other words, you is funked.

    Air gap. We have that. Locked ports. We have that. Two man rule. We have that. Can't talk beyond this. Sorry.

    My point is technology can only go so far in protecting stuff. The people doing this stuff only need to think of a few words.

    VPN. SecureID. One time passwords.

    But ftp with no passwords and not even sftp with passwords?

    Fire them all.

    qz

  3. Re:How egalitarian by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a pretty misleading headline. U.S. Military? These are government contractors, civilians that do not have a clue about IT security and have not even considered what their actions can result in! This really bothers me because for the most part, your military is a cross section of society, coming from all different parts of our culture. When these stupid civilians put lives at risk, possibly mine, I would like to put them on the gate of any compromised base. I bet they would take security much more to heart. Their actions all boil down to a company that wants to make a buck by showing what a great fing job they are doing to fight the war.

    As an active duty Marine, I completely agree with your statements on privacy, I appreciate what little privacy I enjoy and your right to privacy is one of the reasons I have served for 20+ years. I do however take issue with your comparing this instance with our current administration and congress and the military. Politicians are the government that you refer to, not those of us on the ground that are carrying out the fight. Most of us hate the politicians worse than any normal citizen, we fight, bleed etc, they get elected or re-elected based on the B.S. they can sell to the American public. There is not one single politician that has any integrity that I know of.

    Heck, this administration forced me to not be a republican anymore and I will never be a democrat. They all are liars.