How Information Escapes Into the Wild
03 June 2009 1:32 am by spincitysd
http://tiny.cc/DJC2i
A “highly confidential” 266-page report with details on hundreds of American nuclear sites and programs was this week discovered to have been accidentally published online by the federal government.
Each page is marked “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL SAFEGUARDS SENSITIVE” in all caps on the top of the page. The document also contained maps with the locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
Snip
Short Comment:
Again this is just one way information can slip the chains of Government Control. Call it the Murphy’s Law Effect or the Oops-aw-shucks factor. Just a simple bureaucratic screw-up magnified 1000 fold by the power of the web.
H/T to Xeni Jardin and Boing-Boing for uncovering this little gem.
This post was submitted by spincitysd.
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Secrecy News first broke this story. They’ve been included in my blog roll for a long time:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/06/nuclear_sites.html
This was more embarrassing than anything else. Another link option since tiny URL is acting up:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060300028.html
Still, because the information was unclassified and most of it is publicly available through other sources, the release generally was deemed more embarrassing than harmful.
“It is probably not that dangerous, but it is a violation of the law,” said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector and president the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research group in Washington. “You don’t want this information out there, any more than you would want a thief to know the location of a vault in your house.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html
‘Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.
“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”’
But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said information that shows where nuclear fuels are stored “can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out.”
The information, considered confidential but not classified, was assembled for transmission later this year to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of a process by which the United States is opening itself up to stricter inspections in hopes that foreign countries, especially Iran and others believed to be clandestinely developing nuclear arms, will do likewise.
Taylor try this link for tiny URL : http://www.tiny.cc/
I found it because the link to the .com site was blocked by my anti-spyware software.