Air Force Emails Sensitive Information
BBC News has an article about how the US Air Force (USAF) sent sensitive mass e-mails to wrong address. The e-mails were meant to go to the US Airbase at FAF Mildenhall, but instead they went to a tourism website for the town of Mildenhall.
Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall, set up the website “mildenhall.com” in the late 1990s to promote the town.
But by 2001 he was starting to get hundreds of e-mails meant for people at the airbase.
Sensitive information and e-mail should never go together. Some of the e-mails contained data about the flight plan of Air Force One!
My job has had issues with sensitive data going out over e-mail. Its impossible to contain. Is encrypting data (TrueCrypt.org) that hard? Not really… Our 1980’s IT department has updated Lotus Notes (rungeek.com) to add the super secure “Label”.
Now I feel safe that Lotus Notes inserts text into the subject and body of the e-mail. If your going to go through all that work, why didn’t you just add some sort of e-mail encryption (wikipedia.org)like GNU PGP (gnupg.org)?
The open source community has provided great tools like True Crypt (TrueCrypt.org), Password Safe (sourceforge.net), and GNU PGP/OpenPGP (gnupg.org/openpgp.org). Only good things can come with government use of these tools. Government and military organizations would be more secure. Also the community benefits by the Big G paying people to make sure these programs are secure and close any security holes they might find.
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