[Conservative Tsunami]

A soldier, Bradley Manning, 22... The former intelligence analyst is charged with unauthorised downloads of classified material while serving on an army base outside Baghdad. He is suspected of taking copies not only of the state department archive, but also of video of an Apache helicopter crew gunning down civilians in Baghdad, and hundreds of thousands of daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nice "security."

Some 22 year old noobie aka "intel analyst" gains access to The Vault of Vaults? Was the access password, "PASSWORD"??

From top-to-bottom this entire fiasco sounds like BS.

[mc5cents]

Not too hard if the “security” is the same as it was in Stalag 17.

[rlmorel]

I agree, it may very well be as you say… but keep in mind that the military does have very young people in positions to have access to a lot of stuff… stuff requiring responsibility. The military does indeed put young people in positions of responsibility.

As for security, I trace all this back to the Clinton White House, which probably did more to damage security at all levels than any other administration (or all other administrations combined up to this one) due to their handling of security.

If you have ever read the book “Unlimited Access” by Gary Aldrich (who was in charge of White House security and the vetting of security clearances for White House personnel) you will know exactly what I mean.

Bottom line, I can visualize exactly how some young idiot could get access to this material. As another poster stated above, you or I could have probably talked to the guy and figured out in just a few sentences just exactly who he was and what he was all about.

But… our current security mechanisms probably don’t allow that… that might be “prejudicial”, “judgmental”, or “discriminatory”.

[snippy_about_it]

He wasn’t just in intel, he’d been an experienced hacker since age 16.