More on Laptops at War

An anonymous commenter left a thought-provoking comment on Marc’s recent blog entry about Doonesbury’s coverage of how the ability to keep in contact with folks at home changes the face of soldiering. I thought it was interesting enough to promote to the top level:

Of course you miss the flip side, every article I have seen about this always does. The problem with soldiers having all of this technology is that they don’t give a damn about security of the Gov’t network or those that use the network.

It’s not that they don’t know about security, we teach them the basics, a large number just don’t care. They ignore the regulations, rules and often do their best to bypass the security measures.

I’m not talking about operational security (OPSEC), but computer security. People will put crap on their home computers, then transfer it to the Gov’t systems. They will bridge multiple networks at the same time (usually unclassified and MWR), install programs or watch media from questionable sources that are often infected with malware. You wouldn’t believe the number of times we have a Sony Rootkit show up on one of our networks, or the number of machines with active wireless cards that anyone can connect to.

The usual reponse we get is something along the lines of “We’re fighting a war here, we don’t have time for this.”

But they have to learn how to make time:

http://www.gcn.com/print/25_25/41716-1.html

…I’m glad I was over here, but I will really glad to get away from this nonsense for good.