Russ McBee

Two (mostly) unrelated stories caught my eye today; both have to do with protecting the wrong interests. First, President Bush has refused to sign a defense spending bill; his reasons were curious: And then Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Bush announced he will veto a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure provision that ...

An official within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has accidentally revealed the total US intelligence budget, which has up to now remained a state secret. A Powerpoint presentation was published on the agency's website, and some bar charts were left with the original data still lurking behind them; it only took one ...

In another stunningly stupid security lapse, the company that makes the sexual lubricant Astroglide has accidentally exposed the privates of 260,000 people, including their names, addresses, and the products they ordered. This database was accidentally published on a Web server, where it should have never been located. This isn't a security ...

Apparently, an online database maintained by the USDA and the Census Bureau accidentally revealed as many as 150,000 Social Security numbers to anyone searching the site. A bored farmer decided to Google herself and stumbled upon 30,000 SSNs in the process. This wasn't a case of data being stolen, or hacked, or left behind on a laptop in a taxi. ...