Monday, September 17, 2007
Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq - CNN.com
A gun battle that left 8 civilians dead has cost the security firm Blackwater, their license to operate within Iraq.
The ministry said the incident began around midday, when a convoy of sport utility vehicles came under fire from unidentified gunmen in the square.
The men in the SUVs, described by witnesses as Westerners, returned fire, and the witnesses said the vehicles are that Western security firms use.
A witness told The Associated Press that he heard an explosion before the gunfire began.
"We saw a convoy of SUVs passing in the street nearby," Hussein Abdul-Abbas, owner of a mobile phone store in the area, told the AP. "One minute later, we heard the sound of a bomb explosion followed by gunfire that lasted for 20 minutes between gunmen and the convoy people who were foreigners and dressed in civilian clothes. Everybody in the street started to flee immediately."
So these men were fired upon, returned fire, and now they are losing their license to operate within the country. The investigation is ongoing, but there are a few problems I have with this.
Did these men actually kill the civilians? There was an explosion, so did that kill the civilians? Did the people who fired upon the convoy kill these people?
If they did indeed kill these people, then let them stand trial for it. However, revoking the license of the security company will have dire, long term consequences that I don't think the Iraqi's have thought through.
25,000 Blackwater employees are in Iraq right now. You take out 25,000 security folks and now you have a real problem on your hands. Who's going to provide security to those that they now have to leave in the open? It certainly appears that this revoking is a "feel good" response, but I don't know if they know what they're doing.
Travis
Thursday, September 13, 2007
The Associated Press: Report: Lab Not Tracking All Plutonium
Ok, if you can't be trusted with the nations nuclear secrets and materials, maybe you should all be fired and replaced with competent people? Maybe you should revamp your security? Maybe you should turn it all over to people who actually TAKE THIS STUFF SERIOUSLY!
A stockpile of plutonium and other nuclear weapons materials stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn't been fully accounted for in 13 years or more, a government audit has found.
The northern New Mexico lab's workers have done regular, partial inventories of the material, which the government considers to be at high risk of theft, the audit by the Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, found.
Yet an inventory of all the material hasn't been done in "perhaps 13 years or more," Friedman wrote. It wasn't even done when the lab's management contract changed last year, investigators noted in the report made public Wednesday.
Friedman said he is concerned because the lack of complete inventories means that lab workers likely haven't physically accounted for all of the material in more than a decade.
Granted the chances of inventory actually being missing is pretty low, but if they don't understand how crucial the material and documents are, then maybe a good firing is in order? At my job, if network security is breached, I'm the one responsible for it. Well if it happens enough times, guess what happens? I'm looking for another job.
And that's with relatively minor confidential information. This is stuff that in the wrong hands, can kill thousands of people.
That's something I don't want on my conscience, so I would take security of that as serious as you could get.
In an area that stores less sensitive nuclear material — containing smaller amounts of plutonium and uranium — a new shipment of nuclear material wasn't documented for eight days. Auditors noted that it was supposed to have been entered into the system within four hours.
"Under the circumstances, the nuclear material could have been diverted without any record showing that it had ever existed," Friedman wrote.
That's how serious this type of thing is.
Some lab employees don't follow instructions for how to develop identification numbers for the materials so they are easily identified. For example, auditors said one system was based on characters in a movie that a technician had just seen.
Well if he's not following the rules, fire him, demote him, reprimand him. Make sure it doesn't happen again. Am I the only one who sees this as a major problem??
Travis
Labels: idiocy, nuclear program, Nuclear Weapons, Security
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
FT.com / World - Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
While I imagine we're doing the same thing against just about every nation on Earth, I do wonder why the Chinese were successful in their attack? Of course they deny it, but you know damned good and well it was them.
Even Lieutenant General Robert Elder says that just about everyone routinely scans our networks.
What I'd like to know is, how difficult would it be to simply ban every IP originating from China when you're in the Pentagon? I mean I don't understand hacking to a degree that professionals would, but when I have a spammer who tries to get into my networks, I simply ban their IP address at the firewall and within iptables.
Can't we do the same with China? Is it really that difficult? Why are computers with secrets even physically connected to the internet? Can't they use a private network of satellites or something?
There's 101 things that you can do to stop attacks like this, but I wonder if there's no simple way to fix it or if I have a huge career ahead of me working at the Pentagon. :)
Travis
Labels: China, Internet, military, Security
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
