Gen. Clark: P2P file sharing exposes classified gov't documents

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Gen. Clark: Sensitive Gov't. Documents Exposed by LimeWire


In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday, Gen. Wesley Clark - the former supreme commander of NATO forces and US presidential candidate, speaking as a board member of and advisor to security software company Tiversa - cited a study by his company revealing that in a period of two hours' search time on the P2P file-sharing system LimeWire, over 200 classified US Government documents were discovered.

"If you saw the scope of the risk," Gen. Clark testified, "I think you'd agree that it's just totally unacceptable. The American people would be outraged if they were aware of what's inadvertently shared by government agencies on P2P networks. They would demand solutions."

Later, Clark stated, Tiversa engineers located the entire Pentagon backbone network security infrastructure diagram, which apparently came as part of a package that included a letter from the US Office of Management and Budget warning of the dangers of using LimeWire and other P2P file sharing programs on computers where sensitive or secret documents are stored. The material, it was discovered, was copied from the computer of a single Pentagon contractor, who happened to be a LimeWire user. She didn't share those files intentionally; instead, her local file system was exposed through LimeWire.

-snip

"Peer-to-peer file sharing is a wonderful tool," Gen. Clark conceded in his testimony, "it's going to be a continuing part of the economy. It's a way that successfully moves large volumes of data, and that's not going to go away. It has to be regulated, and people have to be warned about the risks, and especially our government agencies, our National Security Agency, DOD, people who run the SuperNet, have to take the appropriate precautions, because we can't have this kind of information bleeding out over the peer-to-peer network."

http://www.betanews.com/article/Gen_Clark_Sensitive_Govt_Documents_Exposed_by_LimeWire/1185501675