RSSMarine One docs fly to Tehran, but not from Lockheed
By Angela Gunn | Published March 2, 2009, 11:29 PM
A Maryland company appears to have made it possible for sensitive information on Marine One -- President Obama's helicopter -- to turn up at an IP address in Tehran, according to Tiversa, a third-party monitor of peer-to-peer networks. Blueprints, avionics information and cost breakdowns were found on the Iranian computer.
A number of Bethesda-area firms are contractors or subcontractors to the Department of Defense, including Lockheed Martin, which is building the next iteration of Marine One and recently came under fire for spectacular cost overruns on the project. (The current fleet was designed by Connecticut-based Sikorsky.) But a continuing investigation by Rick Earle at Pittsburgh's WPXI says that according to Tiversa, Lockheed is not the source of the leak, which was apparently caused by a contractor who loaded a peer-to-peer client on her or his machine.
Various nations, including several unfriendly to the US, are known to troll the file-sharing networks looking for sensitive information.
If this story is true about the file sharing taking place, then some one should be held up on treason charges! I can not imagine how an employee could note think of files on that helicopter being a matter of national security. No matter who the president is, he or she would have to fly on that thing! Shame of whomever did not protect those files. Send them to jail!!!
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|Actually, you should get your facts straight before you comment. Only 7 of these helicopters have been made and Obama has said that he's putting a halt on them being made while he can look into alternatives. He didn't specifically order these, and they were ordered BEFORE he was in power.
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|Timely article. I agree the cost overruns are insane and why does the president need 23 of these new (or old since every country that is hostile to us probably has the information) but, alas, that is the nature of government including the current one (no offense to the Obama Drones). You can pretty much take the government's projection of cost and multiply it by 3-5 to get the true cost (i.e. the Big Dig in Boston originally pegged at a whopping 2.6 billion and now we are at 15 billion and counting).
I am going to continue to sidestep the legal issues of P2P (I'll leave that to people who seem to love to rant mindlessly at their computer screen ) and talk about technology in general.
In general, technology is neither good nor bad. Humans, in their use of technology determine that issue. So let's make some assumptions:
1) A significant chunk of the population are just plain idiots and whether it's is genetics, in-breeding or just being naive about the internet doesn't matter.
2) A significant chunk of the population will use technology for less than noble reasons.
3) Bu default, population 2 is going to find the easiest prey in population 1
So, P2P is, from a technology perspective, neutral and how people use it determines the rightness or wrongness and given the above assumptions, one would hope that some chunk of the population would fall into a 3rd category and that is being cautious when using technology and realize that they are people just waiting to prey upon you.
So if you are going to use P2P technology, at least understand that there are people that will abuse it and the very nature of P2P limits your ability to detect in time when this happens.
Everyone have a nice day:)
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