There are times that technology actually changes things. As Michael Froomkin of discourse.net tells it, “To Really Foul Up Requires a Computer” (citing theinquirer.net):
You can’t make this stuff up.
Secret Airforce One flight data sent to Suffolk tourist web site:
SINCE 2001, the US air force has been sending highly confidential emails including the flight plan for the presidential jet, Air Force One, to an English factory worker who runs a Suffolk tourism website.In the late 1990s, Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall in Suffolk, near Cambridge, set up the website www.mildenhall.com, to promote his hometown. He soon became inundated with emails meant for airmen at the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, where personnel email addresses end in mildenhall.af.mil.
It was all harmless enough when the emails were mundane messages to friends and silly videos, but soon Sinnott discovered that he was also getting battlefield strategies and military passwords sent straight to his inbox.
Note: theinquirer.net, a mildly scurrilous but generally well-informed British technology e-rag is not to be confused with a supermarket tabloid of a similar name.
Regardless of the online source, this story appears to have originated in the Eastern Daily Press here in good old East Anglia in Norfolk, England. Here’s their take on it:
They are known for being the most security conscious country in the world. But United States Air Force officials were left red-faced today after it emerged that a Suffolk factory worker had been sent hundreds of emails outlining highly classified information, including documents detailing the proposed flight path of a visit to the region by President Bush.
Quite a bit more here.
Unbelievable. But yet, believable.