Bradley Manning Hearing: Court Told of Iraq Unit's Intelligence Security Chaos

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/18-2

A shocking lack of basic discipline and intelligence security at the unit in which Bradley Manning worked before his arrest for allegedly transferring the largest trove of state secrets in American history to WikiLeaks has been revealed at his pre-trial hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Under cross-examination by Manning's defence team, the head of the intelligence unit at the military base in Iraq where Manning was posted painted a picture of staggeringly loose controls. Soldiers were allowed to store movies on secure computer databases, were permitted to bring in commercial music CDs to areas where secure computers were in operation, DVDs were left strewn about and there was no system for checking that classified information was not removed from the building.

Captain Steven Lim told the hearing that he was shocked when he was presented with a set of memorandums from Manning's immediate supervisor, Master Sergeant Paul Atkins. The memorandums chronicled emotional behaviour on Manning's behalf dating back to before he was deployed to Iraq in October 2009.

Yet Atkins did not warn Lim, or any of his other superiors in the chain of command, about Manning's problems until 3 June 2010 – after his May 25 arrest. The memorandums gave details of an email that Manning had sent Atkins in April that year in which the soldier confessed that he was suffering severe psychological problems including gender identification disorder that was making it difficult for him to do his job, to interact with other people or even to think.

[marmar]

1. The whole Bradley Manning saga reminds me of an Orwell quote:

[font size="4"]"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."[/font]

[xchrom]

2. +1

[midnight]

6. It sure seems that way...

[DeSwiss]

3. K&R n/t

[thucythucy]

4. From the start of all this

I wondered how on earth an enlisted soldier--whether or not he's with "military intelligence"--could end up with access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents and files.

Now I know--from the looks of this, it was sheer incompetence on the part of the higher-ups.

[bemildred]

5. I worked in defense 21 years, saw lots of security theater, all of it bullshit.

Though having a high clearance was often an excellent career move.

So anyway, yeah, I have no problem believng he could get access to all that stuff; I was a sysadmin a lot, and I had access to pretty much anything I wanted, not that I wanted any of it, and that was the norm. I worked on a military network in the late 90s that had open anonymous FTP and Telnet ports for example, no sandbox either, with lots of secret stuff inside, and all of us supposed to have clearances. I suppose they do better these days, but there are always new toys (like thumb drives) coming along and screwing that up.

[EFerrari]

7. Yes, and his persecution is meant to distract us from the fact

that not even the military takes their own security theater seriously despite the fact that they have bankrupted us in its name.

[markpkessinger]

8. I'm an IT type for a large, corporate law firm...

... and I thought exactly the same thing. If that kind of breach of security (i.e., a low-level employee who had that kind of extensive access to sensitive information) happened in any of the law firms in which I've worked, the FIRST head to roll with be the MIS/IT director!

The basic principle in most large corporate (including legal) environments when it comes to data security is that any given employee in the organization has exactly as much access to information as that employee needs to do his or her job, and not an iota of access beyond that. The idea that a private would have access to such huge stores of data is simply mind-boggling.

[Solly Mack]

9. K&R

I'm not surprised.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. When the story first broke

people who worked Intel at one time commented that this had to be the case... that is before seeing any of this.

So my only comment to this is DUH!