Maybe now someone will use camera to picture from the screen, or retype everything, or tell someone by telephone, or something else.
Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#22This just reminds me of SnowCrash. Y.T.'s mom routinely going through lie detectors and what-not just due to being a government employee:
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#23It's worth noting that this (reduction in the efficiency of internal communications) is exactly what Assange wanted: The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulti…
That article is enlightening - it changed my take on Assange from "guy who is really good at disseminating classified information" to "guy who is really good at executing a well articulated plan to reduce secrecy in government".
These few lines sum it up nicely:
Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about.
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#24Well, 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.
Yes, they were. Back then it was a more apt name.
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#25> But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial. I'm pretty sure anyone stealing the data is already risking a court martial. 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. Also, I…
When I worked on Wall Street all of our Desktops literally had the USB ports ripped out. I'm really surprised the military doesn't do something like this...
Weren't you connected to the internet?
What would stop you from connecting to Gmail (HTTPS) and emailing something to yourself?
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#26It's worth noting that this (reduction in the efficiency of internal communications) is exactly what Assange wanted: The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulti…
This assumes that every piece of information being passed back and forth is used to further a conspiracy. Much of it is mundane, albeit necessary.
Sure, it's what he wanted, but that's part of the problem here. The government, like they always do, overreacts to fix the problem, and now even basic security measures could be hampered.
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#27On blog talk radio, I heard James Fallows talk about how the State Department is furious at the military for their shoddy security here. According to his sources, State Department systems have much more of the basic protections in place.
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#28This article fails to draw enough attention to a key item -- these are enhanced restrictions only for the classified systems. The headline reads like a ham-handed overreaction that's going to make it impossible for people to type up their quarterly reviews and leave requests.
I didn't deal with anything classified, but my understanding five years ago was that:
1. Any device that's gets plugged in to a secure system needs to have the red "this contains classified info" sticker on it. 2. Once a device becomes classified, it can never be plugged in to an unclassified system.
It sounds like the actual story is "military reviews, reiterates security policy in the wake of wikileaks scandal."
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#29I notice that did not stop plenty of information about this order to end up in the media within an extremely short time.
Presumably wired citing 'sources' means that some people are still willing to talk to the media about the information they received. Of course, 'hard' proof (actual copies) of stuff tends to be much more damning but you'll never be able to lock up that information carrier called the brain and it will hold plenty of bits of information.
What bugs me is that no government seems to have clued in to the most obvious and totally secure method of cleaning up their act and making sure that nothing worth leaking is done.
Re: Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I worked on Wall Street all of our Desktops literally had the USB ports ripped out. I'm really surprised the military doesn't do something like this...
Weren't you connected to the internet? What would stop you from connecting to Gmail (HTTPS) and emailing something to yourself?
Extensive proxying? MITM? There's no reason they wouldn't put their own root certificate onto the machines. For most work on Wall Street one probably doesn't even need to be connected to the internet.