Work for the military? Couldn’t help but view a purloined WikiLeaks cable on your desktop? The Pentagon has to insist you delete it. But don’t worry about having the rest of your files scrubbed in a fit of information-security hysteria.
A memo issued January 11 from the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence instructs the military’s millions of employees and contractors that they’ve got to get rid of any WikiLeak’d classified information, even if it’s been “posted on public websites or disclosed to the media.” Should any of the diplomatic cables or frontline military reports WikiLeaks disclosed cross military-owned computer screens, anyone reading the leaks needs to inform their “information assurance manager,” who’ll get rid of them.
This being the Pentagon, the memo tells information experts to “delete the affected file(s) by holding down the SHIFT key while pressing the DELETE key for Windows-based systems.” Would those info professionals not know how to delete?
The worst that’ll happen to the at-work WikiLeaks viewer is having his reading habit documented by the info manager. Beyond that, the memo instructs, ” No incident report or further sanitization of government IT systems is required,” owing to the “prohibitive cost of standard sanitization procedures.” Your workplace iTunes library is safe.
Steven Aftergood, an intelligence and secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists,acquired and published the memo. He writes that it shows “tentative signs of flexibility” from the Pentagon in dealing with the WikiLeaks spillage.
It’s certainly a far cry from the 24th Air Force’s decision last month to block the websites of news publications that published the WikiLeaks cables. But don’t push your luck. The memo doesn’t lift the military’s renewed ban on CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and other portable media that might spirit away classified information — an offense that can lead to a court-martial.
As Aftergood notes, though, SHIFT+DEL doesn’t actually get a document off your hard drive. “In other cases of inadvertent transfer of classified information to an unclassified system,” he writes, “a more rigorous response is often required. But this will now be good enough for the purpose of eliminating classified Wikileaks documents.”
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