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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Following the Texeira leak, I have a question which I do not see covered at all in any of the press. Has been there any investigation started into the security structure failures that led to these leaks? It is obvious that it is a systemic failure - a glorified janitor shouldn't have an access to top secret documents, and most of these documents didn't have much business to be on National Guard airbase anyway, they don't have anything to do with whatever Air Force is supposed to be dealing with. Somebody is responsible for the security on Otis Air National Guard Base - and that somebody screwed up big time. Do we know about anybody being places on leave, suspended, demoted, whatever it is? What is the usual procedure in the Army when something like this happens? How much consequences could be expected to people responsible for preventing such things from happening?

Just a question for the tech community here. Why is it necessary to give someone permission to read the contents of a file in the course of network maintenance, support, and upgrades? It seems like most of that would involve file integrity, moving files about, backing them up, but it doesn’t seem obvious that anything in that job should require the ability to be able to open or read the files in plain text. Had he downloaded encrypted files, it’s doubtful that anyone outside the CIA/FBI and other cleared individuals would be able to break a top secret encryption scheme, which makes it appear that the files themselves were in plain text. But I can’t think of a good reason to not encrypt this stuff in such a way that people without authorization can read them even if they managed to download them and sneak out with them (which also shouldn’t be possible).

It is not necessary, but having someone work on a system with confidential shit on it defacto means they can see confidential shit.

With security, can and will are the same thing. So, every everyone who even gets close to the room the network equipment for the room the computers are in needs to be cleared.

's why your work computer should be a locked down piece of shit where every usb port has a small outward facing explosive in it.