Sensitive Government Documents Exposed by LimeWire
July 27th, 2007Via: BetaNews:
In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday, Gen. Wesley Clark – the former supreme commander of NATO forces and US presidential candidate, speaking as a board member of and advisor to security software company Tiversa – cited a study by his company revealing that in a period of two hours’ search time on the P2P file-sharing system LimeWire, over 200 classified US Government documents were discovered.
“If you saw the scope of the risk,” Gen. Clark testified, “I think you’d agree that it’s just totally unacceptable. The American people would be outraged if they were aware of what’s inadvertently shared by government agencies on P2P networks. They would demand solutions.”
Later, Clark stated, Tiversa engineers located the entire Pentagon backbone network security infrastructure diagram, which apparently came as part of a package that included a letter from the US Office of Management and Budget warning of the dangers of using LimeWire and other P2P file sharing programs on computers where sensitive or secret documents are stored. The material, it was discovered, was copied from the computer of a single Pentagon contractor, who happened to be a LimeWire user. She didn’t share those files intentionally; instead, her local file system was exposed through LimeWire.
“As I was preparing for the testimony,” Clark continued, “I asked [Tiversa CEO] Bob Boback to search for anything marked ‘Classified: Secret’ or ‘Secret: NOFORN’ [No Foreign Nationals]. He pulled up over 200 classified documents in a few hours running his search engine. These documents were everything from INSUMs [intelligence summaries] of what’s going on in Iraq, to contractor data on radio frequency manipulation to defeat improvised explosive devices. This material was all secret, it was all legitimate. I called the chairman of the National Intelligence Advisory Board, who works for [NSA Chairman] Adm. [Mike] McConnell, and shipped the information to him. He looked at it, he called NSA, NSA has it, they’re now seized with the problem, I think.”
Never overestimate the enemy.
See! We DO need the government to control that pesky Internet thingie.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41234