Legal Commentary

To Really Foul Up Requires a Computer

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

You can’t make this stuff up.

Secret Airforce One flight data sent to Suffolk tourist web site:

SINCE 2001, the US air force has been sending highly confidential emails including the flight plan for the presidential jet, Air Force One, to an English factory worker who runs a Suffolk tourism website.

In the late 1990s, Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall in Suffolk, near Cambridge, set up the website www.mildenhall.com, to promote his hometown. He soon became inundated with emails meant for airmen at the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, where personnel email addresses end in mildenhall.af.mil.

It was all harmless enough when the emails were mundane messages to friends and silly videos, but soon Sinnott discovered that he was also getting battlefield strategies and military passwords sent straight to his inbox.

Note: theinquirer.net, a mildly scurrilous but generally well-informed British technology e-rag is not to be confused with a supermarket tabloid of a similar name.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).