Back in the day (1967), I worked for an Admiral and had a top secret clearance. All classified communications were encrypted (yes, we had that resource, even though we had teletype rather than computers). Codes of encryption were changed each day.
If you were going to send anything for the Admiral (all this top secret stuff was on a strict “need to know” basis), then it had to be hand-encrypted, and I was on the “crypto board,” which required you to go to a secret locked room to do such work. Every activity was logged in with paper and signed by members and eventually the top command officers.
This “discussion” about a reserve Air National Guardsman having such security to access these Pentagon communications should have caused a much bigger stir in command than it seems to have done. If we are in a Cold War again, which seems to be the case, then why haven’t security measures been ramped up? Or, I should say, why weren’t they ramped up before this, as we’ve certainly had such leaks before this happened.
The insecurity of our military system is growing daily more haphazard, and this tells me we have mixed civilian interests with the interests of the military community (what Eisenhower warned us about in the 1950s and Johnson and Nixon were nailed over with the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsworth).
Today, security has become more lax and it’s as if nobody cares anymore who gets anything that can compromise the lives of people in the field or on the front lines in our “countries of interest.” Any twenty-one-year-old hacker and bullshit kid can access stuff meant for the Pentagon? This tells me, as a communicator, that civilians have access, mostly arms industry, one would assume, and this means a breakdown in security. If I were working in the military today, I would be shitting bricks.
Who in the holy fuck is in command? Oh. I know. Wall Street and those big, multinational corporations. That’s who. The separation between Church and State, the Military and the Industrial sector, and the interests between warriors and civilian bean counters for profit have all become one bugged sludge pile of confusion because so many grimy hands are eating the government “pie.” And it ain’t the poor folks doing the eating.
