US Military Leaks its Secrets Online

athloi writes "Detailed schematics of a military detainee holding facility in southern Iraq, geographical surveys and aerial photographs of two military airfields outside Baghdad and plans for a new fuel farm at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are among the items accidentally left online by government agencies and contractors."

How egalitarian

[devilradish]

see this is what I like, I'm fine with the government invading privacy just as long as they don't get to have any either.

yeah

[User 956]

This is just another example of how Michael Bay's Transformers movie is completely ridiculous. Megatron wouldn't have had to send his Decepticons to break into the government's computers to steal the location of the all-spark.

As we can see, the DOD would likely just left that information open, available over the web.

Re:Just block all IP blocks from "enemy" nations

[CastrTroy]

Sounds a lot like DRM to me. I think the military should try this. It's working so well for the music/movie industry.

This just in:

[RAMMS+EIN]

US Military Leaks its Secrets Online

In other news, water is wet!

Re:yeah

[PsychoSlashDot]

This is just another example of how Michael Bay's Transformers movie is completely ridiculous. Megatron wouldn't have had to send his Decepticons to break into the government's computers to steal the location of the all-spark. As we can see, the DOD would likely just left that information open, available over the web.

Funny thing is that Optimus Prime claimed to have learned how to speak our languages on "the World Wide Web", but he didn't once use any l337 speak.

How to improve your security...

[digitalderbs]

"The posting of private material on publicly available FTP servers"

$ ftp ftp.usmilitary.com
220 FTP server (SunOS 4.1) ready.
Name (ftp.usmilitary.com): guest
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password: [e-mail]
ftp>

Thankfully, they caught on and learned their lesson : "the SRA anonymous ftp server has been shutdown indefinitely. In the coming months, a new secure ftp site will be introduced that will replace the functionality of this site."

$sftp [e-mail]
Connecting to sftp.usmilitary.com...
Password: [e-mail]
sftp>

Need a more secure alternative to FTP?

[statemachine]

A spokeswoman for contractor SRA International Inc., where the AP found a document the Defense Department said could let hackers access military computer networks, said the company wasn't concerned because the unclassified file was on an FTP site that's not indexed by Internet search engines. "The only way you could find it is by an awful lot of investigation," said SRA spokeswoman Laura Luke.

Gopher... No one looks there!

anonymous ftp?

[bl8n8r]

> the SRA anonymous ftp server has been shutdown indefinitely

Anonymous?... FTP? They may have as well put them on bitorrent and named them britneys_boobies.zip

Re:Keeping secrets

[Anonymous Coward]

See, it's all about the master conspiracy. By leaking unimportant information that only some measly civilians and combatants need to be safe, they distract us from the important matters, like alien JFKs programmed to be weapons.

Solution:

[mdsolar]

H-1B Visas. Just hire some competent foreigners to handle national security. Oh, wait....

Re:How egalitarian

[undeaf]

what is this sun of which you speak?

Okay, how do I explain it in an easy to understand way. The sun is like a huge server that uploads Vitamin D to you. However, we're constantly told scare stories about how we'll accidently download skin cancer from it, to sell antiviolet products. Unless you live near the equator, you can't get very good access to it except in the summer.