"US to declassify Pentagon Papers; Acting 40 years after leak to press" June 12, 2011|By Jason Ukman, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers four decades ago stands as one of the most significant leaks of classified material in American history. Ever since, in the eyes of the government, the voluminous record of US involvement in Vietnam has remained something else: classified.
In the Byzantine realm of government record-keeping, publication of a document in the country’s biggest newspapers does not mean declassification. Despite the release of multiple versions of the Pentagon Papers, no complete, fully unredacted text has ever been publicly disclosed.
Tomorrow, the National Archives and Records Administration will change that, as it officially declassifies the papers 40 years to the day after portions were first disclosed by The New York Times....
It’s not clear how many secrets remain in the documents being released tomorrow. But some of the people who helped write them reacted to the declassification order with a shrug.
“I had almost forgotten about them,’’ said Leslie Gelb, who headed the government task force that wrote the report and is now president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations....
The papers were the creation of officials attempting to quietly rethink the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. But their publication in 1971, at a time when the American public had largely turned against the war, was explosive because it revealed a gulf between the optimistic public statements of the nation’s leaders and their grave private doubts....
Now the thought of the government telling us the truth about anything is the shock.
For Gelb, time has healed some of the wounds. While he initially thought the leak was wrong, he has come to see it, on balance, in a positive light.
Related: Vietnamese Seeing Red Over Agent Orange
Has time healed those wounds?
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"Pentagon Papers cite misgivings on Vietnam aid; As final section is released, entire report put online" June 14, 2011|By Calvin Woodward, Associated Press
In words that echo today’s laments about money misspent in Iraq and Afghanistan, the report says, “Very little has been accomplished.’’
We NEVER LEARN!
Of course, $omeone did accompli$h $omething in all thi$.
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The Pentagon Papers chronicle failures of US policy at seemingly every turn. One was a focused attempt from 1961 to 1963 to pacify rural Vietnam with the Strategic Hamlet Program, combining military operations to secure villages with construction, economic aid, and resettlement.
What Orwellian terms.
The report concludes the United States had learned lessons of the past, namely that Vietnamese villagers would resist attempts to change their lives. The hamlet program “was fatally flawed in its conception by the unintended consequence of alienating many of those whose loyalty it aimed to win,’’ it said.
Well, apparently we haven't learned.
The papers have became a touchstone for whistle-blowers everywhere — and just the sort of leak that gives presidents fits to this day. And the documents show that almost from the opening lines, it was apparent that the authors knew they had produced a hornet’s nest....
Their work revealed a pattern of deception by the Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and prior administrations as they secretly escalated the conflict while assuring the public that, in Johnson’s words, the United States did not seek a wider war.
I don't like JFK being lumped into the group; one reason he was killed is because he was going to withdraw from Vietnam after reelection.
The National Archives released the Pentagon Papers in full yesterday and put them online, long after most of the secrets had already spilled....
So this isn't really news, is it, and it shows how pathetic is this "open democracy."
At the time the papers were leaked, Nixon was delighted that people were reading about bumbling and lies by his predecessors, which he thought would take some antiwar heat off him....
Where is the antiwar heat now?
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You know, the more I look at it now the Pentagon Papers were that era's version of Wikileaks. Certain power sectors in AmeriKa had turned against the war at that time due to the escalating costs in money and control, and the same war-promoting papers advanced the agenda.
"Hackers and thieves a growing Web menace; Technology lag leaves systems vulnerable" June 11, 2011|By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff
On the Internet, there’s nowhere left to hide.
Around the world, computer networks are getting more vulnerable even as they grow more sophisticated. They are being penetrated and looted by digital intruders.
The personal records of 100 million people were stolen in an attack on Sony Corp.’s video game networks. Up to 210,000 unemployed Massachusetts residents were put at risk by data theft software that infected computers at the state’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development. And in March, criminals stole vital information from Bedford data protection company RSA Security, a division of Hopkinton storage giant EMC Corp. The stolen RSA data was later used in a hacker raid on defense contractor Lock heed Martin Corp., an RSA client.
The list of data breaches grows almost daily, and while consumers and businesses can take steps to reduce the risk of losing sensitive information, security analysts say that making our computer networks truly secure is virtually impossible.
“It’s too hard,’’ said consultant Mischel Kwon, a former vice president at RSA and former director of the US government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which responds to threats to the nation’s critical data networks. “It’s too expensive.’’
Kwon said the world’s computer systems have been infiltrated by a host of bad actors, from criminal gangs to radical political activists to digital secret agents working for foreign governments....
Or domestic ones.
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Who are the hackers again?
"IMF suffers ‘major breach’ in cyberattack" June 12, 2011|By David E. Sanger and John Markoff, New York Times
WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.
The fund, which manages financial crises around the world and is the repository of highly confidential information about the fiscal condition of many nations, told its staff and its board of directors about the attack on Wednesday. But it did not make a public announcement.
Several senior officials with knowledge of the attack said it was both sophisticated and serious. “This was a very major breach,’’ said one official, adding that it had occurred over the last several months, even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who ran the fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a New York hotel....
Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece, and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information.
Gee, who would benefit by hacking into that, huh?
It also includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, “political dynamite in many countries.’’
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The attacks were probably made possible by a technique known as “spear phishing,’’ in which an individual is fooled into clicking on a malicious Web link or running a program that allows open access to the recipient’s network. It is also possible that the attack was less specific, a case in which an intruder was testing the system merely to see what was available.
Fund officials said they did not believe the intrusion was related to a sophisticated digital break-in at RSA Security that took place in March, which compromised some information that companies and governments use to control access to their most sensitive computer systems.
RSA notified its clients of the loss of its data, and last month hackers attempted to use the information stolen from RSA to gain access to computers and networks at the Lockheed Martin Corp., the nation’s largest military contractor.
After that attack, the World Bank briefly shut down external access to its most sensitive systems, for fear that the stolen information could make it a target.
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Related:
"About 200,000 Citibank credit card customers in North America have had their names, account numbers, and e-mail addresses stolen by hackers who broke into Citi’s online account site....
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"US said to seek deal in classified leaks case
BALTIMORE -- The Justice Department on Thursday reached a plea agreement in the leak case against a former National Security Agency official.
In court papers, the government said Thomas Drake will plead guilty to exceeding authorized use of a computer, a misdemeanor.
The government's case has been hampered by its reluctance to reveal sensitive details of the operations of its mammoth electronic intelligence service. Prosecutors have sought to strictly limit what is revealed in court and have withdrawn some classified evidence, saying the material could disclose a target of NSA eavesdroppers.
His lawyers planned to portray him as a beleaguered whistleblower who leaked information in an effort to expose waste and abuse, according to court papers....
Sometime in late 2005 and early 2006, Drake contacted reporter Siobhan Gorman, then with The Baltimore Sun, who wrote an award-winning series on the NSA and Trailblazer, an ill-fated project launched in 2002 to overhaul the agency's vast computer systems to capture and screen information flooding into the agency's computers from the Internet and cell phones. The $1.2 billion program eventually failed, and the NSA abandoned it in 2006.
That means they changed the name.
Drake strongly supported an in-house system that was much cheaper and he said could have gathered critical information before Sept. 11....
Yeah, sure, they would have caught the "terrorists" before 9/11, blah, blah, blah.
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Related: Case faltering, whistleblower gets plea deal (By Scott Shane, New York Times)
Globe Editorial The military alone can’t protect against increasing cyberattack
