Another Wikileaks Exposure: The Lady Gaga-National Security Vulnerability

“…he was in fact burning the information”
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…onto a disc or a flash drive, I presume, not incinerating it. That may not have been apparent to anyone over 30

You oldsters are still using fire? Barbaric, man.

Eight-tracks are still in vogue, I hear

I added “onto a compact disc” to dissuade further commenters who might be concerned about fires in the Army’s computer labs.

Where’s the security on these computers? You can block the ability to access removable drives so that no information can be copied to an external device such as flash drives or CDs. And this was not done because…

Thank you for thinking about your demo, MS.
As in -graphic.

…they were too busy listeining to Gag-Gag?

Exiled, there are no 100% fool-proof ways to prevent data copying, especially if you have physical access to the machine. That’s why no blackberries, etc., are allowed in secure terminal rooms, and also explains the whole Lady Gaga – Mission: Impossible subterfuge.

Wrong. The WH cannot go into people’s Blackberries and adjust settings -as they are personal property- so they require them to be left outside of certain rooms. The computers used to house classified information are governmnet property and they can, in fact, be secured to prevent copying to external devices. The reason this kid used the music CD as cover was so that no one assumed he was putting a blank CD into the computer with the intent to copy information. If the drives were blocked from use, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do this at all, with or without his humiliating subterfuge.

“Wrong.”
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That’s pretty definitive, Exiled, but its not exactly accurate.
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Even if the CD/DVD-R drive was removed completely, data can still be copied by a dozen other means. Rootkit block copy apps can be put on a thumb drive and will bypass most software based security walls. 15 minutes on Google and any one of a dozen script kiddies will be in your box and stealing your bases before you can even type a logon.
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This has always been one of the reasons I’m against broad-based electronic data gathering. There is no such thing as a secured machine. If the data is gathered, it can be copied and disseminated.

momen…I agree. Stealing data has become pretty routine. And if it is done from the inside??????

Can someone please now ask John Kerry (who supported sending additional troops to Afghanistan) how he can ask a man to be the last man to die in Afghanistan?

We’re not talking about your personal computer, here. These are customized government computers on secure servers. While it’s not foolproof, there are ways of significantly reducing copying risks. Giving unfettered access to removable drives is lunacy of the highest proportions.

No argument there Exiled. My point was no security is foolproof and data leaks are inevitable.
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There’s a secondary rant I could go into on OpsSec policies at government facilities and how out-of-date a lot of these policies are, but I’d bore you all into an acronym-laden dementia if I did

White House National Security Advisor James Jones released a statement this evening which said, “The White House strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information which tends to show that the war in Afghanistan has become a complete fiasco.”

That should be:

“that the war in Afghanistan had become a complete fiasco as of November 2009.”

Not that its necessarily less true now, but connecting the dots has now become a case of extrapolation, rather than interpolation.

The White House quickly put out a correction: “While everything we did during the first eight years in Afghanistan was certainly catastrophically counterproductive, not to say moronic and immoral in the extreme, we need to make clear that we are now doing much MORE of it.”

Such a sad, sad day for this Administration. From firing a totally “innocent” woman, to these wiki-leaks.
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Almost makes one pine for the days of George W. Bush again.
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LOL!!!
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George Bush II: “Miss me yet?”

It’s just what we deserve for electing the anti-Christ, right Rusty?

Almost makes one pine for the days of George W. Bush again.
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In your tribal rage and myopia, have you ever truly stopped pining for that Administration’s catastrophic incompetence and dishonesty?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/the-ones-who-attacked-us/

Goes back to that NewSpeak I was talking about a couple posts ago. Up is down, right is left, blue sky is gray clouds and backward is forward. Common sense has indeed found a rest home.

One more inane post and I may start hoping for him to be pining for the fjords.

“He isn’t pining for the fjords, he’s pushing up the daises!”
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It’s been a few decades and I still can’t hear the word ‘pining’ without a Monty Python flashback.

“In your tribal rage and myopia, have you ever truly stopped pining for that Administration’s catastrophic incompetence and dishonesty?”

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Well mr zechman, please explain what exactly you find to be catastrophic incompetence by the Bush II Administration? How does it compare to the current Administration’s handling of most things so far?
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One would think that you could have objectivity with your condescending remarks, but then again, why expect any liberals to change now.
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With the current Administration, we seem to have one unfortunate, almost catastrophic incompetent event each and everyday. I don’t seem to remember it being so badly handled in the previous administration, but then again, like you are with Obambi, I am sort of biased I’ll admit. Have you admitted it to yourself yet?

“Well mr zechman, please explain what exactly you find to be catastrophic incompetence by the Bush II Administration?”
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Going for popcorn (jumbo), be right back.

Well mr zechman, please explain what exactly you find to be catastrophic incompetence by the Bush II Administration?
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Great question, Rustyblog, thanks so much for asking.
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I suppose to start, I would have to say this:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/cheneymeetthepress.htm

Interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney, NBC, “Meet the Press,” Transcript for March 16, 2003.
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——————————————————————————–
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Guest: Vice President Dick Cheney
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Copyright 2003, National Broadcasting Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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PLEASE CREDIT ANY QUOTES OR EXCERPTS FROM THIS NBC TELEVISION PROGRAM TO “NBC NEWS’ MEET THE PRESS.”
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NBC News
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MEET THE PRESS
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Sunday, March 16, 2003
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GUEST: Vice President DICK CHENEY
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MODERATOR/PANELIST: Tim Russert – NBC News
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MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
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VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
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MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.
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VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and we’ve deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.
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MR. RUSSERT: We have had 50,000 troops in Kosovo for several years, a country of just five million people. This is a country of 23 million people. It will take a lot in order to secure it.
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VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, but we’ve significantly drawn down our forces in Kosovo and in the Balkans. There’s no question but what we’ll have to have a presence there for a period of time. It is difficult now to specify how long. We will clearly want to take on responsibilities in addition to conducting military operations and eliminating Saddam Hussein’s regime. We need to be prepared to provide humanitarian assistance, medical care, food, all of those other things that are required to have Iraq up and running again. And we are well-equipped to do that. We have got a lot of effort that’s gone into that.
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But the—again, I come back to this proposition—Is it cost-free? Absolutely not. But the cost is far less than it will be if we get hit, for example, with a weapon that Saddam Hussein might provide to al-Qaeda, the cost to the United States of what happened on 9/11 with billions and billions of dollars and 3,000 lives. And the cost will be much greater in a future attack if the terrorists have access to the kinds of capabilities that Saddam Hussein has developed.

Hey, don’t trust me, I’m biased.
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I’m a liberal.
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Just read the incomparably incompetent and dishonest Dick Cheney, in his own words, Rustydog.
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Don’t argue with me, argue with him.

Gosh, Stuart. That was almost two years after this one:

President Bush spends most of August 2001 at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, nearly setting a record for the longest presidential vacation. While it is billed a “working vacation,” news organizations report that Bush is doing “nothing much” aside from his regular daily intelligence briefings. [ABC News, 8/3/2001; Washington Post, 8/7/2001; Salon, 8/29/2001] One such unusually long briefing at the start of his trip is a warning that bin Laden is planning to attack in the US (see August 6, 2001), but Bush spends the rest of that day fishing. By the end of his trip, Bush has spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route.
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“And, at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice. He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve covered your ass, now.’”

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?warning_signs:_specific_cases=complete_911_timeline__strike_in_us__pdb&timeline=complete_911_timeline

Then this happened:

…the disclosure that Cheney instructed Libby to leak portions of a classified CIA report on Joseph Wilson adds to a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed as a covert CIA officer the vice president was deeply involved in the White House effort to undermine her husband.

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0414nj3.htm

After 9/11 but before Iraq:

…the disclosure that Cheney instructed Libby to leak portions of a classified CIA report on Joseph Wilson adds to a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed as a covert CIA officer the vice president was deeply involved in the White House effort to undermine her husband.

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0414nj3.htm

Then there was this:

WASHINGTON — In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11627394/
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Can you believe it, we haven’t even gotten through his first term (and can you believe anyone could be stupid enough to vote for a second one)?

Well mr zechman, I have agreed that in the past, Bush and company (Cheney included), either did not have all the facts when they reacted, or they lied. I tend to believe it was more they didn’t have all the facts rather than out and out lying.
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What you cite however is a statement by Cheney which says basically, “yes we will have a large force in Iraq after the invasion and for up to a few years after the country is stabilized” how is this in any form lying or anykind of “castastrophic incompetence”. Looks like you only prove what Cheney said would happen.
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But, isn’t the real question, “should we still be involved in Afghanistan”? Why are we still involved in Afghanistan? Now that documents supposedly “leaked” to the American public which also show and demand asking “why are we still in Afghanistan”, yet Obama continues to fight an unwinable war.
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Where is your outrage on this point, mr zechman? Or do you just want to continue blaming it all on Bush and Cheney? Does that somehow make it better? Does that solve any of our current problems?
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I didn’t think so.

The WH cannot go into people’s Blackberries and adjust settings -as they are personal property- so they require them to be left outside of certain rooms.
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This is not at all true. Businesses can — and are required by law — to enforce policy on mobile devices that extract information from their servers. My company enforces password protection on my BlackBerry (which I purchased and pay for), meaning that they require me to enter a password in order to access the device when first turned on and when it has been idle for 30 minutes (though I adjusted that to 10). They also retain the ability to remote wipe my device via BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
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If my 1,000 person company can enforce such standards, the White House IT department could do the same (and more).

Rustydog:
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I tend to believe it was more they didn’t have all the facts rather than out and out lying.
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I believe that it was Napoleon who said:
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“Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.”
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, so you may be correct.
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What you cite however is a statement by Cheney which says basically, “yes we will have a large force in Iraq after the invasion and for up to a few years after the country is stabilized”
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You may have misread that statement, so I will reprint it once again:

MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.
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VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree.

If you are suggesting that the former Vice President was disagreeing with the figure of “several hundred thousand,” and was attempting by that language to say that we would need only 150,000 (sometimes 130,000, sometimes 170,000) for over seven years (during which a mini-genocide would occur on our watch), then I’d say that he’s either A) a magnificent waffler, B) a horrible communicator, or C) a congenital liar.
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There are over 4,400 American boys and girls who lie in their graves because of either A), B) or C), Rustydog.
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I don’t think that Cheney “said that would happen.” I don’t think that the American people were aware that’s what he meant, if he did.
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…isn’t the real question, “should we still be involved in Afghanistan”? Why are we still involved in Afghanistan? Now that documents supposedly “leaked” to the American public which also show and demand asking “why are we still in Afghanistan”, yet Obama continues to fight an unwinable war.
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No argument there, you’re right.
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Where is your outrage on this point, mr zechman?
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Where is my outrage? Where it should be, i.e. in public:

White House National Security Advisor James Jones released a statement this evening which said, “The White House strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information which tends to show that the war in Afghanistan has become a complete fiasco.”
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The White House quickly put out a correction: “While everything we did during the first eight years in Afghanistan was certainly catastrophically counterproductive, not to say moronic and immoral in the extreme, we need to make clear that we are now doing much MORE of it.”
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Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/07/26/another-wikileaks-exposure-the-lady-gaga-national-security-vulnerability/?replytocom=184860#respond#ixzz0upD6s1JS

…do you just want to continue blaming it all on Bush and Cheney?
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Don’t I have the right to turn that around, and ask you where your outrage was for the past eight years before Obama doubled-down on our risky and futile policy of occupation in Afghanistan?
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Why does it seem that your outrage over this failed enterprise is…rather recent?
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You’re rather a prolific writer, yourself. You even have a blog (as it were) up of your thoughts and theories (as it were) on the American political-economy.
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Can you point me to a single piece you’ve written expressing outrage over the Afghanistan occupation, but posted before January 20th, 2009?

Thanks, shep. Good times.

What’s the over-under that the MSM will look into the war crime evidence found in the documents, or Swampland for that matter? My guess is the odds are high they remain focused on the issue how much Wikileaks has damaged America.

Oh, and this was also a first-term cock-up which we didn’t find out about until after the election (heckuva job, Bill Keller!). Though it may be hard to make the case for “incompetence” since it looks as though he actually succeeded in destroying the 4th Amendment to the Constitution permanently (though he had lots of help – hi Joe, hello Mr. President).

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 – Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/nyti-a22.shtml

How soon they forget.

What are the odds that the MSM’s “We knew about this all along/nothing to see here” pundits will slowly wake up to the fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Wikileaks is still processing additional information for 2nd (3rd, 4th.. nth) set of leaks.
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I would advise the pundits to shut up until the sh!t really hits the fan.

For all those wondering how easy it was for a solider to copy a lot of secrets to a cd? Wondering why those computers weren’t lock down to prevent this sort of thing?
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A big part of the why has to do with the fact that most of military computer people have been replaced with civilian computer people. Some whom actually work for and are employed by the United States, but an aweful lot whom are hired on some sort of contract.
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So you should not be suprised that having out sourced our military computer security what you get is an easy work around the security that is not military focused but civilian and profit driven.

National Journal? NY Times? MSNBC? Gimme a freakin’ break!

That’s a really interesting point.

@shep:
“Going for popcorn (jumbo), be right back.”
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(Snort)!
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@sz:
Q: “Can you point me to a single piece you’ve written expressing outrage over the Afghanistan occupation, but posted before January 20th, 2009?”
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A: Calling all crickets….

“When White House aides walk into the Situation Room, they are asked to leave their Blackberries and cell phones outside.”
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…as opposed to current MI US Rep and MI Gubernatorial candidate Pete Hoekstra, who feels it is OK to tweet that he is on a “secret” trip to Baghdad.
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http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0209/Twittering_Hoeskstra_reveals_Baghdad_location_.html

I watched a biography on Link last night about the late Howard Zinn. He served in the Air Force during WWII on a bomber. A few weeks before the end of the war his group was sent to bomb a town in France. They wondered why and were told there were a couple of thousand German troops there. The Americans knew the Germans were just waiting around for the war to end. The group did the bombing raid that consisted of dropping some chemicals. They later learned it was an experimental drop of napalm. Germans were killed but so were many innocent French people.
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Stories like that are why I am not shocked by the Afganistan “revelations”. As someone once said, war is “madness” and should never be entered into without absolute just cause. In every war innocent people are killed and governments lie. Did anyone expect when we unnecessarily invaded Iraq and Afghanistan it would be otherwise?

2/3s, would you rather the word of Dick Armey?
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“”Did Dick Cheney … purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue? I seriously feel that may be the case… Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening.” -link

Ok, the LSD has worn off so…
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This is a stupid conversation (no I didn’t read any of the above comments) because we are fighting an outdated version of war in Afghanistan and have been from the start. Industrial war will never succeed in a war that is basically for the “hearts and minds” of the local people.
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If you care to know how to win a war like this try reading the very informative book “The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World” by (Ret.) General Rupert Smith.
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There isn’t much this government did right under Republican control and it’s gone downhill since.