At 05:19 PM 6/22/00 -0400, Sunder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Bill Stewart wrote:
>> Probably because the standard PC software doesn't come with
>> military-quality encryption.
>> In large part this is because the Feds have tried to prevent civilians from
>> using it,
>> and set export policies to discourage it.
>
>What makes you guys think it's not barium. There apparently have been far
>too many incidents of "Ooops, I left my notebook in the pub" or "Gee, how
>did that drive full of nuke secrets just vanish off my desk?"
Because it sounds like the kind of thing that can quite reasonably be
attributed to stupidity rather than malice, and (less objectively) because
it's fun to watch evil government officials fail because of bad effects
of their own activities.
Also because, having worked with classified information in the past,
I know that the stuff occasionally _does_ get misplaced, and the accounting
does occasionally get screwed up, and laptop drives sometimes get taken home
for people to work with at night or left in their desks instead of locked
up in the
Safe Which Requires Bureaucracy To Access, and security officers _do_ get
very
bent out of shape when it happens - and it's reasonable procedure for them
to do a security audit when there's an event like a fire, and not surprising
that somebody got caught taking a shortcut, and tried to cover it up by
dumping the drives behind the copier instead of having them found in their
desk.
On the other hand, the government press releases have been constantly
talking about
"making sure the stuff hasn't been tampered with" as opposed to "of course,
there's no way to tell if anybody copied the data before returning the
drives",
which would be a much more realistic espionage scenario that they don't have
much they can do about.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
