Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks

When I was overseas, we had a difficult time trying to transfer secret data between DoS and DoD terminals...I can imagine this is going to make it much more difficult.

Flash drives have always been disallowed because of malware and virus issues, but CD's and DVD's were what we used to move data between non connected systems. This could be a real pain in the ass.

I'd think that all of these problems could be solved by simply logging disks that are removed from secure facilities.

> If the secret files are really so wide open that they're just counting on people not being able to take them, then there's some much larger problems that they better start addressing.

It's a hard problem. Before 9/11, "the secret files" were locked down tightly, and every branch of the federal government that kept such files kept almost all of them separately; they were subsequently inaccessible to every other branch. The intelligence and law enforcement agencies came under harsh criticism following 9/11 — since information sharing was so limited, it was very difficult to correlate data and properly address targets and threats. The response was to pool a LOT more data than was previously available in one place on SIPRNet, which is accessible to intelligence agents, the State Department, the various military branches, federal and state law enforcement, and even some non-US allies. The truth is that the only files leaked to Wikileaks were not considered to be particularly important, had the lowest level of classification, and were accessible to (and could be easily shared by) over 3 million people.

The response will unfortunately be to lock down information sharing yet again, increasing the likelihood of intelligence and response failures in the future. Most of the federal government and idiot, grandstanding congressmen made the cable leaks into a much bigger event than it would have otherwise been had they not overreacted and simply "kept calm and carried on", and the US will face the self-inflicted consequences.

Secretary Gates had it right when he noted early on that, "I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought."

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/gates-on-leaks...

I've seen them epoxyed all to hell as well.

Well, this is the real way to shut down Wikileaks. Don't leak. Wikileaks is poorly named - they are neither a wiki nor do they leak. Wikileaks is to governments as The Sun is to the British Royal Family. If you are doing something unsavoury, you'd better make sure they don't find out.

I'm thinking that Wikileaks is stating that it's the 'Wikipedia for leaks,' but IIRC they were originally running on a mediawiki platform.