Slashdot Mirror
Data Breach Exposes RAF Staff To Blackmail
Yehuda writes "Wired reports, 'Yet another breach of sensitive, unencrypted data is making news in the United Kingdom. This time the breach puts Royal Air Force staff at serious risk of being targeted for blackmail by foreign intelligence services or others.
The breach involves audio recordings with high-ranking air force officers who were being interviewed in-depth for a security clearance. In the interviews, the officers disclosed information about extra-marital affairs, drug abuse, visits to prostitutes, medical conditions, criminal convictions and debt histories — information the military needed to determine their security risk.
The recordings were stored on three unencrypted hard drives that disappeared last year.'"
Sounds like a convenient way to legally fire or reassign someone.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Just because their bosses already know doesn't mean their wives did.
A lot of the people hiring will have indulged in all these behaviours and wont condemn someone for them. Rather it will make them part of the club. Use of prostitutes in the armed forces? Goodness - that could never happen! With some groups, the person who never touched drugs, doesn't pick up prostitutes is the one that makes everyone else uncomfortable. In Bosnia, the private military firm DynCorp was actually buying girls as forced prostitutes (and I do mean girls - some were fifteen. And this were US soldiers). Related, its one of the reasons women face a 'glass ceiling' in some areas, such as the upper military, high finance, etc. It's because the wealthy / powerful men who are accustomed to doing as they please feel uncomfortable saying: "hey lets all do some lines and pick up some hookers" when someone from "the other side" is amongst them.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Why do so many folks expect the people we hire for our dirtiest jobs (like thermo-nuclear incineration of entire nations) to be do-no-harm nice guys?
At best you are going to get people who act like the majority of the society they represent.
"They're great at grabbing reams of private information they would have no right to if Britain were still a free society."
When were we ever a free society? When has any country been "free"? I suppose there's a philosophical discussion to be had here but I get the sense that
Interested to hear when you think the UK was a 'free' society. It would have to probably be after 1928 - universal suffrage, before then women under 28 couldn't vote so they weren't very free. Couldn't be 1939 - 1952 as we had identity cards then. Interested to hear your definition of 'free'.
cheers.
All Royal Air Force staff involved can thus forget about any clearance at all since they can be blackmailed.
I guess the military should compensate said personnel for loss of career possibilities and of course improve their data protection/storage/etc policies.
An affair doesn't make an officer inherently disloyal to everyone, that's far to simplistic a view to take. If there's a pattern of behaviour, then that is a different matter. Same with finances. If your forever dipping into an overdraft or are mortgaged up the wazoo, then you pose a different risk to someone who's had bad credit in the past but is now exemplary.
The problem is that this system relies on people being able to hand over this information in confidence. If people realise that this is no longer secure, then that vetting scheme is fundamentally broken.
I worked for a while in this area. If you want to get rid of a failing, and very expensive, defence project, the best way to do it is to have an 'accidental' security stuff up. That way you can ditch the failed program under the guise of 'national security' rather than incompetence, mismanagement, and the various other real reasons for project failures. This also means the project managers usually get off from being completely incompetent. Rather than have a failed project, they have a security breach, which is often investigated and forgotten about with a slap on the back and a guffaw (especially if the member is a part of the boys club).
It wouldn't surprise me if the stuff up was part of some Machiavellian back room defence politics. The old canard that civilians (especially on /.) state about choosing incompetence over conspiracy can be thrown out the window when it comes to national security and defence. Many of these individuals realize they have a system that can be exploited for their own personal gain if needed.