Feeling safer now?
I was never one to so readily label the apparent myriad of missteps, mistakes and, quite frankly, bone-headed maneuvers attributed to the Bush regime over the past seven-plus-years as simple ignorance or the ever-popular "incompetence." There have been too many diabolical effronteries committed by this gang of thieves; too many lies and contrivances for my tastes, and way too much secrecy throughout the administration for me to simply write them off as incidental. However, when things like the following happen, I always feel a momentary urge to reassess my conclusions.
When British factory worker Gary Sinnott opened a tourism website in the late ‘nineties to promote his small home town of Mildenhall in Suffolk, he had no idea that anyone would confuse his website address with the U.S. Air Force. The address, Mildenhall.com, must have seemed a pretty safe bet to Mr. Sinnott, with the worst possible scenario imaginable being that someone would confuse the web address with that of an official town agency or function of sorts.
Gary Sinnott was wrong.
He recently shut down his website at Mildenhall.com at the request of the U.S. Air Force after receiving thousands of emails, intended for U.S. military personnel endowed with top-security clearances. In fact, according to the BBC, the emails weren’t limited to isolated, casual interdepartmental banter either. Over a period of more than seven-years, Mr. Sinnott received official upcoming flight plans for Air Force One as well as military passwords, tactics and procedures interspersed with regular email memos.
Wired Magazine has the story:
The news reports about this, if true, leave a lot of questions unanswered -- such as why this information was even being sent over the internet, and unencrypted at that. And how is it possible that this continued for more than seven years before anyone took action?
Unfortunately, the domain name was a bit too similar to the domain belonging to the Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall (www.mildenhall.af.mil), which is controlled by the U.S. Air Force and houses a number of U.S. squadrons and wings -- among them the refueling wing for U.S. and NATO aircraft traveling in and through Europe.
Almost immediately after launching his tourism site, Sinnott says he began receiving e-mails sent by military personnel that were clearly intended for the .af.mil domain name but were mistakenly sent to his .com domain instead.
Sinnott says he received mostly casual communications at first. But he became concerned and contacted the military base when he started finding as many as a thousand emails per week in his inbox. But officials there simply told him not to worry about it – even after he explained about their sensitive nature.
One e-mail discussing military tactics came with a notice that said "Destroy by any means to prevent capture."
Finally, realizing the urgency of the situation, the Air Force asked Sinnott to block certain email addresses to his ISP, and subsequently warned military personnel from using those addresses.
The emails didn’t stop.
The Telegraph reported that agents from the USAF Office of Special Investigations visited Sinnott and asked him to delete any classified e-mails he received and began to block e-mail sent from addresses in the military's domain to his .com domain.
The Telegraph also noted that some people in the military are worried that hackers or state enemies will launch similar sounding sites to intentionally attract errant military communications.
Somehow, I find myself baffled by the fact that they didn’t consider that possibility a long time ago.
But, then again, that’s just me.
Peace