Laughing stock of the Universe

[Goodwatch]

I think we have most un-secret secret service in the entire universe! A year ago, a Dutch DA in Amsterdam put his broken PC at the curb, along with other garbage waiting to be collected. Broken? Well, not the hard drive inside. A cabbie took the PC home and browsed the content of the hard drive. On it were (unprotected) dossiers about pending criminal cases, names of informants and, as an added bonus, loads and loads of kiddie porn. His boss scrambled to bail him out and before the press a vague statement was made about him not knowing he downloaded the filth. Yeah, sure. He’s not a DA anymore but still has a job. I know of several cases in which people were fired on the spot because their PC at work contained spicy material.

A couple of months ago, an employee of the Dutch Secret Service, the AIVD, left a stack of diskettes in his lease car before bringing it back to the lease company. The diskettes were found and delivered to an investigative reporter. Again, highly sensitive information and reports about covert operations. What happened to this clown I don’t know.

And now, as the piece the resistance, within a 3 weeks time span, two of those yokels each lost a USB memory stick (again, unprotected) chockfull of highly classified material. This morning, the Defense specialists of our Parliament were briefed in secret with recon and intelligence reports about the situation in Afghanistan. There’s 8 years jail time if they would utter one letter about those reports. And guess what? The draft version of that briefing and secret surveillance info about our Minister of Defense were on the stick that was lost yesterday! The finder brought the stick to the editors of a Dutch TV program and after being copied it was returned. The person who lost the USB stick is (was?) a member of the Dutch Military Intelligence Agency.

This time I think heads will roll but it is too late. Foreign secret services won’t trust as much as a 1 year old newspaper to us anymore! Damn, more holes then Swiss cheese.