Government harassing and intimidating Bradley Manning supporters was brought to my attention earlier today. Since I have announced a number of conferences that involve travel to destinations outside the United States, for U.S. citizens and residents, I wanted to bring it to your attention.
Best advice: Do not attempt to return the United States with electronic devices.
What is particularly disheartening about this story is that it illustrates the continuing incompetence of the United States with regard to IT issues. The agents in question may as well be using paper towel tubes to look for clues about the Wikileaks security breach.
With a topic map, one of the first subjects to represent would be the deeply flawed system design that enabled access to diplomatic cables over an extended time period. The contractor, sysadmins and others would definitely be nodes in that map. Not to mention a physical audit of all the equipment with access to that data would be another issue, not just a premature focus on one possible suspect. It isn’t all that hard to imagine other compromised hardware, given that thousands of people had access to the same data.
I would exclude from such a topic map as noise the reports/discussion about Private Manning because that is a diversion of attention from the poor security practices and accountability for those practices (none to speak of) that lead to this breech, whoever was responsible.
Given how unperturbed the DoD seems to about the leak of the State Department cables, one has to wonder how seriously the chain of command communicated the alleged need to maintain security with regard to this cables? That could be another set of nodes in such a map.
A far cry from the “quick, we need a suspect and therefore the suspect must be guilty, that’s why we are abusing the suspect,” approach taken in this case. Stopping security leaks is different from saving face in the aftermath of security leaks. Maybe that’s the difference.