President Obama isn't very excited about his fancy new helicopter, but that's not his fault, he just hasn't seen its super-neat blueprints yet, because he's not allowed to have Limewire.
Right, I'll back up for a second. The embattled chopper(s)—under fire for their cost and alleged foreign manufacture have been trotted out by republicans as an example of government spending spun out of control. Just as that controversy seemed to be subsiding, reports surfaced that the blueprints and avionics package for Marine One have been leaked over a peer-to-peer network, to Iran. Oops?
The leak wasn't at all intentional, unless you consider trusting technical illiterates with such sensitive material "intentional". No, the leak happened because an employee at a unnamed defense contractor (The Register thinks it's Lockheed) accidentally stored the files in a P2P folder, or, and this is more likely, just set his entire hard drive to share. Before long, the files had been uploaded to ~~xOsamaFanIran74x~~ and the intelligence community fell into a tizzy, all because some guy wanted to catch up on Big Love during his lunch break. In an interview with WXPI, Wesley Clark summed up the situation—and then, hilariously, the internet—for all of us:
We found where this information came from. We know exactly what computer it came from. I'm sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went. Once it's out there, it's hard to get it back. I don't think the full ramifications of this have been understood by the watchdog agencies.
Read more at DSL reports
US Contractor Follows Japanese Example: Leaks Military Secrets Via P2P
Nearly four years ago, it was reported that a contractor in Japan who had plans for a nuclear power station leaked them via a file sharing app on his personal computer. It was never clearly explained why he had those classified work-related materials on his personal computer, but it led to quite a mess, with the government begging people to delete the nuclear secrets, if they found them. You would hope that with that as a guide, other government and military contractors around the world would be more careful. No such luck. Apparently no one takes things like basic computer security seriously anymore.
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