P2P Network Exposes Obama's Safehouse Location 307
Lucas123 writes "The location of the safe house used in times of emergency for the First Family was leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, a fact revealed today to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Along with the safe house location, the LimeWire networks also disclosed presidential motorcade routes, as well as sensitive but unclassified document that listed details on every nuclear facility in the country. Now lawmakers are considering a bill to ban P2P use on government, contractor networks."
PsyOps (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ban the man (Score:2, Interesting)
Mostly I would promote beatings and the pillory for people who put classified information on a computer that is ever connected to the internet. This would be on top of the usual loss of clearances and everything else that would already happen now.
Re:ban the man (Score:5, Interesting)
To the power-grabbing, meglomaniacal nanny state committee-rats in congress, here's an idea: clean your own house first.
You're completely discounting the possibility that this data was planted on LimeWire by the government expressly in order to give them this exact leverage.
Those files could be completely false, for all we know.
People that take action based on this allegation alone are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Re:ban the man (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a stupid employee who has access to your tax records (if you pay the corporation I work for to do your taxes). Here's why I need File transfer and web access.
1. I do returns for the normal US income tax, all 50 states and some odder locations (territories, other nations). I send these electronically most times, but some locations still require paper filing. I would need copies of both all the forms and each year's instructions, going back at least 4 years for the Federal individual taxes, and longer for corporate taxes and some others. I guess I could keep copies of all those forms in office for the occasional use, instead of downloading them only for the rare instances they are needed - However, we'd have to literally buy the grocery stores in the same malls as our typical offices to make those 'back rooms' big enough to store all that. There's a reason why Federal forms sometimes have numbers like 9737-F, or Schedule M3 (version for form 1120, hispanic).
2. I research stock basis for customers about 50 times a year - it's incredible how many people don't know what they paid for the stock they just sold. I also have to occasionally determine what the property tax rate in some particular city or county of some other state is, find an employer ID number for one of over three thousand day care centers in our area, get a copy of someone's W-2 from an employer that only posts them through an online aggregator.
I could probably keep updated local tax tables for 140,000+ locations without the net, but there's a turnover of about 250 new daycare businesses a year in the area I am responsible for, and the average phone contact with one of those results in some idiot who thinks what I am asking for is their sacred duty to protect from me the 'social engineer', instead of something they are legally required to add to their yearly statements to their customers. Being able to get those from the state's website saves us maybe a hundred hours a year and greatly improves chances of our clients managing to file on time.
Take away the net for daycare contact, and you have two choices. Draconian enforcement of the laws about providing records on time, with all the escalating penalties maximized until any mom and pop business that doesn't bother to learn and follow all the regs is savagely and swiftly driven out of business, or my company and all our competitors raise the fees for filing a child care credit by about 200$ a form.
3. I sort and handle records by SSN, something I personally don't trust when most businesses do it to me and wish I could avoid asking for with my clients. But, in this case, there is no other way for me to do it - I have to collect and give people's SSNs to the government on the forms, so I might as well use them for internal tracking as well. I see all sorts of other data, i.e. bank account numbers for people paying the IRS by direct withdrawal or getting back by direct deposit at the very least, or prescription numbers for controlled painkillers when I prepare some people's schedule As, and recording any of that that isn't absolutlely required or keeping it after it's been used would be even riskier than purging it from the databases after use and keeping the SSNs. I still have to hand carry many documents rather than fax them, even though a lot of federal or state agencies are a lot looser with security than we are and I see faxes into the office that break all sorts of rules.
I need web access to do my job, but that required access is so broad there is no policy you could write to limit that web access that wouldn't hurt some of my clients. I have had to get copies of 1099-MISC's for exotic dancers, Breakdowns of employee related expenses from Game designing companies, and even look at a person's home office over a webcam before. The first year we set a policy that prohibited adult sites, game sites, or webcams, I had to request five exemptions and it would have been higher but most of the customers were willing to go to some trouble to put returns on hold and wait till they hand carried forms instead. Probably most preparers in my district had two or three such problems minimum. We still have a policy, but the exemptions system makes it pretty much swiss cheese.
Re:ban the man (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ban the man (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a defense contractor as well, and I help clean up/secure data spills frequently. Despite the NDA and high level clearances these guys had to prove they were bland enough to get, they are never punished for the spills. I've seen spills that have affected and inconvenienced a thousand employees, as we confiscate their BBs and PCs and they get to sit and wait while we get new ones prepared, the responsible party never gets punished and sometimes thinks it is funny. I have asked people to leave my office because I could not stand their presence any more. If you are going to laugh about creating tons of work for me and my team, you will be the among the last people to get back up and running. Add to it that the IA peeps(security) are usually not computer savvy and you get situations where they want to confiscate our BES and mail servers, and we have to fight tooth and nail to keep them.