Fifteen minutes of fame - how not to do it

From Sean Linnane:

WHISTLEBLOWER BLOWS WHISTLE ON WIKILEAKS WHISTLEBLOWER

�If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?�

I dunno about you, but somehow the thought of betraying my country and causing potentially grave damage to National Security was never a temptation to me.

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks:

U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army�s Criminal Investigation Division.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

The best comment was this: "I hope the biggest, hardest SOB in Leavenworth makes this puke his girlfriend." To be so blind as to your position of responsibility and to be so ignorant that every action has a reaction. Everything you do in a situation like that leaves a fingerprint somewhere and all it takes is for someone to correlate the prints and come up with a very short list. When I worked at MSFT, I was on the Windows 2000 ship team and there was a problem with builds being leaked to the world at large. It took them about two weeks to nail the leak to the desktop in question. They could have done it a lot faster but they wanted a solid body of evidence. One of the shortcomings (thankfully) with these people is that if they do not get an immediate slap on the wrist for their actions, they will continue. The other wonderful shortcoming is that they think, in their own little sandbox, that they can see what is happening in their computing environment at large. As they say: Heh...