Military Bans Removable Media After WikiLeaks Disclosures

cgriffin21 writes "The Pentagon is taking matters into its own hands to prevent the occurrence of another WikiLeaks breach with removable media ban, preventing soldiers from using USB sticks, CDs or DVDs on any systems or servers. The directive prohibiting removable media followed the recent publication of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, which were leaked to whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks at the end of last month by a military insider."

Comments

horse

[florescent_beige]

barn

Re:horse

[Maxo-Texas]

And the next step is to not say "We are firmly for position X" in public while saying "We agree, we are against position X" in private.

The bald faced lies tend to make honest humans want to rat them out periodically.

Re:horse

[nharmon]

He was a SP4 who was demoted to PFC because he assaulted an officer. The question isn't why a PFC had access to sensitive information. The question is why someone with demonstrated behavioral problems still had a secret clearance.

Re:horse

[mwvdlee]

I'm sure the military had a ban on leaking information too.
Why would they think a ban on removable media works any better?

Re:horse

[Drantin]

I think you meant to respond to The Snowman... But either way, he wasn't saying you got your definitions wrong, but that you got the direction wrong... NIPR -> SIPR has always been just fine (although the media, once connected to the SIPR side, is no longer allowed to be attached to the NIPR side) but SIPR -> NIPR has never been allowed...

Why not ban covering up military mistakes?

[kawabago]

The military slaughtered innocent people and covered it up. That was the reason for the leak, to shine a light on wrong doing. To prevent a future leak the military should also own up to it's mistakes and not cover up innocent accidental deaths in future. That would do more to prevent future leaks than any amount of security.

Re:Nothing to see...

[Facegarden]

...The problem here is that a random private in Iraq had access to State Department cables from (e.g.) Honduras. Need-to-know-basis isn't a new idea, this was a major FU by the governing security body.

Apparently the reason they did that was that the 9/11 commission said it was *too much* secrecy that left us unable to prevent 9/11. They said that if more people had seen all the little signs, it would have been more likely that someone spoke up. So then the military responded by allowing more people in the military access to that information.

The real problem is that we keep doing a bunch of secret shit in private, and then tell the public "don't worry, everything is fine, the war is going great, things are totally cool." The public knows they were getting smoke blown up their ass, and they wanted the truth. So, they found it. The military is creating a market for the truth by keeping it from us.

In this day and age, if you deprive people of information, they're only going to want it more. The whole method of "damage control" that the US govt has been doing in the middle east is just flat out ineffective. I really wish they would just tell us the fucking truth. Then there'd be nothing interesting in these cables, and a lot fewer people would get away with fucked up behavior.
-Taylor