897th HAM Ordnance Co Site News and Blog

Wikileaks commentary

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT

I have no love for Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. However, the real problem is not with guys looking for fame and fortune on the web. There are two worse problems. First is Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning and his accomplices, or whoever delivered classified documents to Wikileaks and other unauthorized parties. The second problem is that Manning had unrestricted access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

Manning is a traitor. He knew the rules, even if he didn’t fully comprehend the documents or the consequences. Manning intentionally broke the rules. Lock him up without his laptop.

But, Manning should never have been able to leak readable documents. There is no technical reason for storing unencrypted, classified documents. All classified correspondence should never leave the keyboard of the sender until it is encrypted. It’s not hard to encrypt and decrypt. Yes, these are extra steps; it would take a few extra seconds for Hillary to order her spies around. Regardless of what you see the geeks do on NCIS, a standard encryption product is effectively unbreakable. But no, Hillary’s wonks are just too darn busy to bother protecting their work, and Wikileaks is what we get.

News conferences at which we hear calls for terrorism charges against Assange are a distraction from the incompetence of anyone with a higher rank than Manning. Assange makes lots of noise about espionage, but again, he just wants fame and fortune. (He is running from a Swedish rape charge, and he should answer for that, but that’s independent of Wikileaks.) Just hammer his web site with a DOS attack and let Interpol grab the guy.

While that’s happening, fix the real problems. Install some relatively cheap encryption software so that the privates realize that they might as well stick to playing Black Ops.

Palm Desert pub features 897th info

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:00:00 GMT

The Historical Society of Palm Desert along with Arcadia Publishing Arcadia Publishing recently issued "Images of America: Palm Desert". Search the Arcadia site for titles with "Palm Desert". The new book includes WWII training era photos from Julian Gocek, the father of this web site’s author and a veteran of the 897th US Army company commemorated on this site.

David Lewis, 2008

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT

In memory of 897th vet David Lewis, passed away July 3, 2008, Ridgeland, MS.

VA data theft commentary update

Sat, 1 Jul 2006 12:00:00 GMT

CNN has posted an article about the recovery of the stolen laptop. The theft was real, but apparently, the data was not accessed. The employee is fighting his dismissal, but good news aside, a terrible breach still occurred.

VA data theft commentary

Wed, 31 May 2006 12:00:00 GMT

These 897th web pages are hobbyist pages, in the sense that the content is of personal interest to me and my 897th veteran father. However, I have been a professional software developer since 1980, and the May, 2006 theft of US Department of Veterans Affairs data appalls me. My understanding is that a data analyst brought a laptop home to do work at home, and the laptop or a disk in the laptop contained personal information on 26 million veterans (mainly recent vets, not WWII vets). The analyst’s home was burglarized, and the burglars stole the laptop. The analyst was authorized to access the data (but not to remove it from the VA facility), so the issue is one of safeguarding the data against access by non-authorized parties. Whether or not the thieves were actually looking for the data is irrelevant; they would not have the data now if the data never left the VA facility. The analyst and a supervisor were fired. This is harsh punishment, but their behavior was egregiously bad and fails to meet the most basic standards of data security. A worker should not risk the exposure of that much personal data. The typical American knows enough about data security today to say that the behavior was obviously bad. The fact that the supervisor was also fired indicates that there is a recognition that the problem is systemic. Procedures which the VA claims prohibited the removal of the data from the VA facility were ultimately inadequate -- the data was removed. If there is a recognition that the problem is systemic, where does the buck stop? What level of supervisor is high enough up to claim ignorance of employee activity that has such a wide effect? Even if no one suffers an identity theft or financial damages, this incident will cost the USA millions of dollars.