Keith E. Whisman

November 21, 2008 at 11:27pm

Good now I hope that they quit selling secrets to the Chinese and Russians as well. At least try to catch the people doing it and hang them for it. Hard drives are constantly disappearing in our Nuclear research facilities and labs. It happens so much that it doesn't even make the news anymore. And the Chinese, Iranians, Russians, and North Koreans don't exactly like us. Why should we trust them not to use our secrets against us. We need to start growing some balls and caring more about ourselves and less about the rest of the fucking world. We need to kill our enemies and protect our interests and demand our enemies to pay us tribute to keep us from destroying their asses. Cue up Battle Hymn of the Republic somebody...

nsvander

November 21, 2008 at 8:23pm

I find this funny that they are just now disabling access to thumb drives and burners.  My wife and mother-in-law both work for a major health care company, and they both have company issue laptops.  They order them sans optical drives and all usb ports are disabled so you cannot use a thumb drive, ext. HDD, or usb burner.  They have been this way for years, nice to see the military finally catching up to the private sector.

jwalch.hawk

November 21, 2008 at 9:07am

I can see this being a bit of a pain in the butt, but I'm actually glad to see them airing on the side of paranoia...  I mean, this *is* the military after all.

Maybe they need some kind of device that they can run the storage media (ie, flash drive or writeable DVD/CD) through to determine that it's "clean"?

karnak

November 21, 2008 at 8:10am

They must have got one of those email chain letters and are just taking the necessary precautions. 

Hitman

November 21, 2008 at 7:00am

I am in the Military and this affects all computers connected U.S. Military networks worldwide. Starting Monday they disabled access to USB ports and Optical Drives by users. It has been very inconvenient, now the only way to transfer documents between computers is by email, and that’s restricted to 4mbs for most users. If you want to transfer a large PowerPoint presentation you have to get permission from your local IT department. The bigger picture is this is a small inconvenience to protect our Military Networks, and we really have no choice but to comply.