Sweden’s Transport Agency moved all of its data to “the cloud”, apparently unaware that there is no cloud, only somebody else’s computer. In doing so, it exposed and leaked every conceivable top secret database: fighter pilots, SEAL team operators, police suspects, people under witness relocation. Names, photos, and home addresses: the list is just getting started. The responsible director has been found guilty in criminal court of the whole affair, and sentenced to the harshest sentence ever seen in Swedish government: she was docked half a month’s paycheck.
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Last March, the entire register of vehicles was sent to marketers subscribing to it. This is normal in itself, as the vehicle register is public information, and therefore subject to Freedom-of-Information excerpts. What was not normal were two things: first, that people in the witness protection program and similar programs were included in the register distributed outside the Agency, and second, when this fatal mistake was discovered, a new version without the sensitive identities was not distributed with instructions to destroy the old copy. Instead, the sensitive identities were pointed out and named in a second distribution with a request for all subscribers to remove these records themselves. This took place in open cleartext e-mail.
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The weight capacity of all roads and bridges (which is crucial for warfare, and says a lot about what roads are intended to be used as wartime airfields);Names, photos, and home addresses of fighter pilots in the Air Force;
Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody and anybody in a police register, all of which are classified;
Names, photos, and home addresses of all operators in the military’s most secret units – equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams;
Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody in a witness relocation program or who has been given protected identity for other reasons;
Type, model, weight, and any defects of any and all government and military vehicles, including their operator, which says a ton about the structure of military support units;
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All of this was not just outside the proper agencies, but outside the European Union, in the hands of people who had absolutely no security clearance. All of this data can be expected to have been permanently exposed.
Source: Worst government leak: clueless agency moved everything to “The Cloud”
Just completely wow!
Robin Edgar
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