Who needs enemies when you've got Gen. Mark Milley running the Pentagon?
Here's the latest military fiasco on his watch, as reported by the Financial Times (second link here):
Millions of US military emails were misrouted to Mali by a “typographical leak” that exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and travel details of senior officers.
Despite repeated warnings over a decade, the steady stream of email traffic to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, continues to be the result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix for all US military email addresses.
The problem was first identified nearly a decade ago by Johannes Zurber, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage the country domain in Mali.
Zuurbier has been collecting misleading emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take this issue seriously. He has nearly 117,000 misdirected messages — about 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter to the United States in early July, Zurber wrote: “This danger is real and can be exploited by enemies of the United States.”
Three things make this story newsworthy: The Dutch entrepreneur who has been catching these things for awhile and trying to alert the Pentagon to the scope of the problem is about to lose his contract with the Mali government -- and the Mali government will take over instead.
Two, he's been trying to alert the Pentagon about it and getting ignored. The Pentagon says they are aware of the problem and have it all under control -- but this guy is obviously sitting on lots of emails.
Three, the Mali government, by the wildest of coincidences, isn't just a crummy little third world hellhole as perceptions may be. It's a tight and favorite ally of Russia, which has obviously seen the value of that alliance with a country that just keeps getting missent U.S. military communications. What a convenient ally for them -- they don't even need to pay spies or hackers, all they need is access to friendly ally Mali's servers and they can hold their hats out and let it rain. Mali's happy to help out and Russia will reward them well.
With the Pentagon denying a problem and the Dutch entrepreneur saying there is a problem, this sounds like reason enough to haul in Milley yet again for another grilling from the House on this latest fiasco.
What exactly are they doing to prevent mis-directed emails? Are they spending so much time on woke education for military desk jockeys they aren't training them properly? How are they holding people accountable for mistakes? Can they program in a .mil key on all keyboards and block any hand typed email addresses to prevent this from happening? Congress should be entitled to straight answers on that, because the incompetence of this Pentagon and the wokester geniuses who brought us the Afghanistan pullout is pretty obvious.
Time to fix this immediately before the Russians get hold of the servers and read every sort of Pentagon email that can be misrouted to sunny Mali.
Image: U.S. government image, via RawPixel // public domain