I remember hearing about bad OPSEC at Volkel. Something about how there was sensitive national security secrets indirectly being leaked bc soldiers didn’t set their Quizlet flashcards to private when studying for their exams.
Sometimes this kind of thing needs to be explained even to very senior people, not just lowly troops. I knew of a four-star general asking a few years ago why we didn't use Signal for stuff instead of Teams (O365 tenant hosted in Microsoft's Government Community Cloud), because he "heard that it's so secure that even the NSA can't break it." The answer is that there's a difference between a system being "secure" and being accredited for classified information or even unclassified information that the government owns.
Edited to add: Another very senior DoD person actually got in trouble for using Signal for official business a couple years ago because, among other reasons, there's no way for the government comply with FOIA when someone is using a personal account on a commercial application like that.
Do you have any additional information on the punishment? The precedence has been set that “no reasonable prosecutor “ would prosecute someone over using personal servers/apps/out band communication to subvert FOIA and National Security.
> Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
> Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir...
> there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
is not the same thing as
> using personal servers/apps/out band communication to subvert FOIA
He stepped down, and my quick search doesn't show him actually facing punishment. And his case was different, as some members of staff did believe he was encouraging use of Signal to prevent FOIA strikes.
Per his LinkedIn page, he went straight to what is probably a cushy job at Vanderbilt University. Interesting career path, by the way. He was "Director of IT at OpenTable" for seven years, and then did four years as a "Police Officer" in the Chicago PD before going back to IT stuff there.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
I know these human mistakes are inevitable in a large organization, but it's still sobering seeing that a soldier would post nuclear vault release code locations and more online. I guess it's easy to be careless in the daily grind whether it's PII or nuclear secrets...
Officially to this day this is all a Dutch state secret (can neither confirm nor deny bla bla bla). But there was an interview with ex prime minister Lubbers and he talked about the nukes. The poor man's mental faculties were already slipping.
If anyone is wondering according to NATO plans as I understand it the Dutch Airforce is supposed to be under US command dropping the bombs. A bit of a democratic cluster fuck that bypasses parliament to initiate nuclear Armageddon.
He wasn’t the only one. FTA:
“two former Dutch prime ministers and a defense minister in 2013 even acknowledged the presence of the weapons.”
> “If NATO was to conduct a nuclear mission in a conflict,” NATO says, “the B-61 [sic] weapons would be carried by certified Allied aircraft…However, a nuclear mission can only be undertaken after explicit political approval is given by NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) and authorisation is received from the US President and UK Prime Minister.” It is unclear why the U.K. Prime Minister would have to authorize employment of U.S. nuclear weapons, and unless NATO territory had been attacked with nuclear weapons first, it seems unlikely that the 29 countries in the NPG would be able to agree to approve of employment of non-strategic nuclear weapons from bases in Europe.
It is interesting that use of the weapons would require authorisation by the UK PM. In WW2 mutual consent was required due to the Quebec Agreement [2], but that requirement was included in later treaties.
[0] - https://fas.org/blogs/security/2022/10/steadfast-noon-exerci...
[1] - https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/2/pd...
“Negligence” and “strict liability” are different standards, you can’t treat one with the other.
> So if you "could have" caused a leak, it's still treated like a leak.
That’s very much not how the Espionage Act works, even just on the statute and beforr considering Supreme Court precedent limiting its application.
https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/data-spill-an-everyday/
This is a better summary. At the start, everyone's phones would likely be confiscated and, I would think, destroyed, if they were discovered to have classified data on them. However, if the data was in the cloud it would be an even bigger deal.
Was that your point?