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Reporters Find US Gov't Data In Ghana Market
narramissic writes "'Hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,' were found on a hard drive purchased at a market in Ghana for the bargain basement price of $40, said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led an investigation into the global electronic waste business for the PBS show Frontline. The hard drive had belonged to US government contractor Northrop Grumman and in a made-for-TV ironic twist, 'some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices,' Klein said. 'Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.'"
$40 for a used hard drive of unknown provenance seems pretty high, unless you are talking about a considerably cooler than ordinary drive. Methinks that those journalists were haggling about as effectively as someone with an expense account for the story might be expected to.
.I thought the same thing at first, but then I read the rest of the summary:
some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices
Typically we're interested in contracts during the bidding process (to make sure the public is not being ripped off), and later on, to see that the contractor actually delivers the goods. But "transparency" doesn't mean everyone needs to know the details of how Northrop Grumman builds its missiles or whatever.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
They should lose their contracts for failing to wipe the data off the hard drives.
They likely will as this is almost certainly a violation of ITAR regulations. Northrup Grumman does very little that is non-military.
They most certainly will not lose their contracts over this. They'll find a way to blame the lost data on some tiny sub-subcontractor that the subcontractor responsible for disposing of used equipment hired to wipe the drives, and they'll get fired. Or maybe they'll fire the person who kept the data on their hard drive instead of the network drive, and trot out the click-through policy that says "we told you we could fire you for violating this policy."
There's always a weasel-way for companies to get out of these situations by blaming someone for the failure.
John
Those "locks" do nothing to protect the data, and the drive still spins up when power is applied. You can even retrieve the password if you know what you're doing. Full drive encryption is a much better solution.
Same here, that is just stupid and wasteful, not to mention based on old wives tales. I have yet to see ANYBODY recover a DoD wiped drive. You'd think that one of those data recovery firms would brag about it if they had actually been able to pull it off, yet nada. Give them a good DoD wipe and then they can be reused in computers for the poor.
Even to this day I have no problem giving away a 400Mhz or better to somebody who doesn't actually have a PC. Just slap DSL-N and they have a nice clean desktop that is quite fast and a pleasure with to surf. I keep a 733MHz around to run Win9X for old games and to surf on when my main boxes are busy, and with 384Mb of PC100 and DSL-N it is a very pleasurable surfing experience. It is just stupid and wasteful to destroy those drives and make even more e-waste when they can be reused by those that don't have any. Single moms, homeless shelters, churches, there are tons of places that are quite happy to take a free working machine, and if everyone destroys the drive the cost of giving those machines away suddenly becomes too expensive.
So don't fall for old wives tales, DoD wipe and recycle. Good for the environment and your fellow man.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.