A tourist information website promoting a small Suffolk town has had to shut down after it received a barrage of thousands of classified US military emails. Read the story here. Oh my God! Resourceful? If this is all it takes to tap into our sensitive and classified information, setting up a website named closely to an official one, we are absolutely screwed. This is incompetence on a scale I would not even expect from the military of a third world banana republic.
Just who is in charge of OPSEC (Operational Security) for our military at the moment, Bozo the Clown? Our military has been transmitting unencrypted classified data to a British civilian at a mistaken e-mail address for eight years - including such things as the flight plans for Air Force One.
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Our military is the finest in the world in large part because it holds itself to very high standards. Failures happen of course, but they are almost never of the spectacular variety and they are addressed as soon as they are recognized. So the story in today's Telegraph is an anamoly - but a huge one.
OPSEC has been a critical component of military operations since time immemorial. And our military and intelligence operations are no different. OPSEC means taking those steps necessary to insure that one's plans and other sensitive information stay secret. Sensitive materials must be protected from enemy agents and not disclosed beyond those with both the proper security clearance and the need to know.
In today's world, that means that you only transmit classified material to people authorized to receive it and that if you are transmitting classified materials by any sort of electronic means, that you do so by secure means. It should be encrypted. This is very basic stuff.
This is a big deal in the military. There are intelligence officers at battalion level on up whose duties specifically include overseeing OPSEC, and even the lowliest grunt is trained in the basic techniques of OPSEC. This is deadly serious.
So why on God's green earth is there some poor Brit in the town of Mendenhall, U.K. who can't get the U.S. to stop sending him their unencrypted classified documents - some of it very highly classified? And to raise the level of incompetence on this one - he's been trying to get them to stop for eight years:
Sensitive information including future flight paths for US Presidential aircraft Air Force One, military strategy and passwords swamped Gary Sinnott's email inbox after he established www.mildenhall.com, a site promoting the tiny town of Mildenhall where he lives, the Anglia Press Agency reports.
As well as Mr Sinnott and his neighbours, Mildenhall is home to a huge US Air Force base and its 2,500 servicemen and women, and the similarity in domain names has led to thousands of misdirected emails from Air Force personnel. Any mail sent to addresses ending @mildenhall.com would have ended up in Mr Sinnott's mailbox.
. . . Mr Sinnott said: "You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that I have been receiving - I wonder if they ever had any security training. When I told the Americans they went mental.
"I got mis-sent e-mails right from the start in 2000 but even after I warned the base they just kept on coming. At one stage I was getting thousands of spam messages a week.
. . . "But then I began to receive military communications from all over the world - a lot containing very sensitive information."
Agents from the USAF Office of Special Investigations have visited Mr Sinnott to ask him to delete any classified material he may have received, but concerns have been raised that resourceful terrorists could use similar methods to fool the US military into revealing state secrets. . . .
There is only one conceivable first step in handling this. To put this in the military vernacular, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff needs to start a new collection - testicles in glass jars adorning his desk. The donors should be the G-2 Intelligence Officers responsible for OPSEC at Mildenhall AFB since 2000. Then our elected leaders, our military and our intelligence people need to get to the very bottom of how this could possibly happen - and why we have anyone, let alone what seems to be a bevy of soldiers, transmitting classified material without encryption.
We got lucky on this one - but the fact that our military is worried that this might not be isolated is potentially disasterous. What if this information fell into the hands of al Qaeda or Iran? Or possibly worse, the New York Times?
Update: I have contacted every source that I can think of to get confirmation of this story. I would expect to get feedback next week.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Holy OPSEC, Bat Man! We're In Trouble
Friday's Verse
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
- William Ernest Henley, 1875
Art: Leonidas at Thermopylae, Jacques Louis David, 1814
Interesting News & Posts - 29 February 2008
Interesting news and posts from across the blogosphere:
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Art: A Dream of Solomon, Luca Giordano, 1693
From ABC News: The Joint Chiefs chairman has a word of warning to Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: A rapid of withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a "chaotic situation" and would "turnaround the gains we have achieved, and struggled to achieve, and turn them around overnight.
The Captain blogs on the Obamanomics of Fear, considering an article in the Economist that says Obama’s economic plans and rhetoric sound "worryingly populist."
From Seraphic Secret: "The impossible situation whereby the Palestinians continue to fire Qassams, while receiving electricity for their Qassam workshops and fuel used by vehicles that fire Qassams, is deluxe terrorism that fits well with the dictum: ‘The master of the house has gone mad.’" I concur. The only way Israel can stop this insanity is to respond with overwhelming force.
From Jammie Wearing Fool: "Like most normal human beings, I'm forever indebted to Matt Drudge for bringing us Monica Lewinsky, among other interesting stories. Over the past ten years, he's gone where most media cowards dare not tread. But what the hell was he thinking by revealing the fact Prince Harry was stationed in Afghanistan? Did we really need to know this?" Nope. We sure didn’t.
Blonde Sagacity tells of the defense being raised in an Australian trial of 12 men on charges of terrorism. Apparently, they were merely responding to the evil of the U.S.
Bull Dog Pundit thinks that McCain passed his "Sister Souljah" moment when he repudiated the statements made by local disc jockey Bill Cunningham taking leveling low class polemics at Obama. I concur and think it will go a long way to inoculating him against charges of racism.
Confederate Yankee ponders whether we "have . . . completely breed the violence of self-preservation out of this generation?"
From the Jawa Report, with appropriate visuals: "Angelina Jolie, official hot bi-curious celebrity babe of The Jawa Report," supports the troop surge.
From Villagers With Torches: VWT is one of the most incisive bloggers out there. His post today revolves around a quote attributed to de Tocqueville : A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy.
U.S. foreign policy for moonbats, from a New Zealand blog posted by an Aussie. And leftie moonbat politics seem to be driving the Kiwis to the land down under. Meanwhile, the Velvet Hammer blogs from the U.S. about multiculturalism and gang violence in Melbourne. You gotta’ love the anglosphere.
Dinah Lord tells us that french supermodel Katoucha Niane, a victim of and activist against Female Genital Mutilation, has been found floating in the Seine.
At Brain Droppings, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is draining the swamp.
From Red Alerts, the deadly toxin ricin has been found in a Las Vegas hotel room. As many as seven people were possibly exposed. No word yet on the circumstances surrounding how the ricin got into the hotel room, though its hard to imagine that this is not connected to terrorism, and while it may make sense for the LVPD to play down the possible connection, it does not pass the smell test.
Obamaspiracy
Will this be Obama's first real election? What happened to all of Obama's other opponents over the years? Read on for the full reptilian tale . . .
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I got the ball rolling on this issue and took it to the 10 yard line by taking note of some very undemocratic activities by our would-be Messiah. Daffyd has picked up the ball, run with it the last 90 yards, spiked the ball in the end zone and done a Lizard-like victory dance. Do slither over to his site and read about "Chicago Rules." It is an exceptional post that ties together some very troubling - and reoccuring - themes that surround he who would be President.
Obaminations & Bad News (For the Left) On Iraq
I asked in an earlier post whether Obama was unprincipled and being less than honest with America. This report on Canadian television, if true, clearly answers those questions. Public perceptions of the situation in Iraq have become significantly more positive over the past several months, even as opinions about the initial decision to use military force remain mostly negative and unchanged. Public perceptions about U.S. progress in Iraq continue to improve. In fact, in a number of areas those with positive evaluations outnumber those with negative views. As AllahPundit at Hot Air asks: In case you were wondering why the Democrats are running from this debate, it’s because the more public opinion shifts, the more their willingness to abandon Iraq looks less like a “realist” exit strategy than calculated defeatism. Even so, note how inelastic most of the results are despite the security gains (especially in Anbar). The microresults show impressive shifts — click the image and follow the link to see double digit swings in the “Growing Perceptions of Iraq Progress” graph — but the baseline results below are static. I wonder why.
(H/T Taylor Marsh)
Obama's campaign has denied this reports accuracy. The television station that broke the story is standing by its veracity. Update: More at Powerline. Update 2: Hot Air is reporting that the television station has named Austin Goolsbee, a economic advisor of the Obama Campaign, as the person that contacted the Canadian government, and he is refusing to admit or deny the conversation.
Update: And it would seem that the remainder of the Democratic Party leadership is troubled by this "trade tirade."
And there have been some significant changes in U.S. pulic opinion about Iraq. This from the most recent Pew Research Poll: 
The number of Americans who say the military effort is going very or fairly well is much higher now than a year ago (48% vs. 30% in February 2007). There has been a smaller positive change in the number who believe that the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals (now 53%, up from 47% in February 2007). . . .
For the first time since Pew began tracking the question in December 2005, more respondents say that the United States is making progress in reducing civilian casualties (46%) than say it is losing ground (40%). Similarly, 49% now say the United States is making progress in defeating the insurgents, while just 35% say it is losing ground. A majority (57%) now says the U.S. is making progress in training Iraqi military forces (29% say the U.S. is losing ground).
Even on the key political objective of establishing democracy in Iraq, a plurality (49%) says the U.S. is making progress (vs. 40% who say the U.S. is losing ground). This is the first time since the fall of 2006 that a plurality sees progress on this measure. On another key objective, however, the plurality view remains negative. While more now say the U.S. is making progress in preventing a civil war between various religious and ethnic groups (35% now vs. 18% a year ago), just under half says the United States is losing ground on this objective (49% vs. 68% a year ago). . . .
(H/T Instapundit)
