Redwood City, CA
Not to be outdone by the press, Anonymous is joining in on this week’s leaks with a Department of Defense-related leak of its own. The hacktivist group posted a cache of internal Department of Defense documents on PasteBin today, and it’s damn proud of itself.
“We bring this to you, so that you know just how little rights you have. Your privacy and freedoms are slowly being taken from you, in closed door meetings, in laws buried in bills, and by people who are supposed to be protecting you,” the group said in the overly verbose language that’s become its hallmark.
NetOps is less about information acquisition and more about sharing information that the Department of Defense already has.
The 12-item leak is a grab bag of documents, some of which discuss in mostly dry detail the Department of Defense’s efforts to make a more powerful internal information sharing network. Another leaked document is a stock photo-filled pamphlet about how government employees can apply for and keep their security clearance.
The problem, though, is that while Anonymous is making a big deal about the leak, there’s very little here that’s particularly new, interesting, or even secret. As at least two documents explicitly state, “This instruction is approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.”
Likewise, programs like NetOps and the Department of Defense’s Global Information Grid are already so well known that they already have their own Wikipedia pages. (Unsurprisingly, there are exactly zero mentions of Prism in the documents.)
Still, the leak does show that not even the Department of Defense can quite keep its information away from the prying eyes of journalists and hackers — for whatever that confirmation is worth.
