Maintaining secrecy is essentially impossible in a digital world.
This is both good and bad.
Why is that?
Maybe guys with super-Crays can eventually break encryption codes, but I doubt the Wikileaks folks can. If they could you would also be seeing all sorts of corporate data floating around, but you don't.
My guess is that if I sent you a simply encrypted file of two different letters from Thomas Jefferson to someone else (so you would know what you were looking for) that you wouldn't be able to tell me within a year what those letters were.
ML/NJ
Nonsense. Digital communications are much, much safer and much, much harder to break into, if you want it to be......
It’s not impossible. People were just lazy it sounds like.
First, you have to have great background checks. (I have a feeling those are not as thorough as they used to be.)
Second, you have secure networks. You just can’t be on the web. The networks are in secure buildings. You limit who has access to the data. (How did this kid get access to so much data???? Whatever happened to need to know?)
Third, when you do send messages, you send it on a secure network, and you encrypt it.
It sounds like our government has gotten extremely sloppy. I know the Clinton administration was known for being very lax with security. I was hoping the Bush administration would put things back in order, but maybe they didn’t. I’m betting that the Obama administration is even more lax than Clinton.
(I worked for a defense contractor for many years, and worked on secure networks.)
It's impossible if more than one person knows the secret.
After that, it's only a matter of how difficult it is to keep things secret for long enough. For example, have you seen Obama's school records? Birth certificate? When they care, they can keep secrets.
Keeping secrets is a bit harder when 250,000 pages fit on one cd. It's really getting close to impossible when you let every wacko and their significant other have access.
The trouble is the same as it always was -- people and politics. This wacko should never have been among the trusted. And no low-level PFC should have been allowed anywhere near that much data. And it sounds like way too many low-level types had access to this high-level info - which is a political/admin problem.
It's almost like they wanted this stuff to get out. The other option is that keeping this stuff secret wasn't really high on somebody's priority list. And given Billy Clinton's handling of our nuclear secrets, it's would not be out of character for another Clinton and the State Department leftists to slam the USA this way.