Sweden — maybe a little too transparent for comfort?
[ by Charles Cameron — the wholesalest leak of secrets evvah ]
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Whether you think with the poet Rabbie Burns, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley” or with the strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”, you may not have been too surprised when the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park preaches Chaos theory and says, “One thing the history of evolutuon has taught us is that life will not be contained .. it crashes through barriers .. life finds a way.”
Goldblum is right of course, which is why not so long after, there’s a velociraptor loose in the kitchen:
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All of which is to say: there’s no planning for human hubris and idiocy.
Case in mind-blowing point:
This would be laughable, except..
Sweden’s Transport Agency moved all of its data to “the cloud”, apparently unaware that there is no cloud, only somebody else’s computer. In doing so, it exposed and leaked every conceivable top secret database: fighter pilots, SEAL team operators, police suspects, people under witness relocation. Names, photos, and home addresses: the list is just getting started. The responsible director has been found guilty in criminal court of the whole affair, and sentenced to the harshest sentence ever seen in Swedish government: she was docked half a month’s paycheck.
Just a sample:
Last March, the entire register of vehicles was sent to marketers subscribing to it. This is normal in itself, as the vehicle register is public information, and therefore subject to Freedom-of-Information excerpts. What was not normal were two things: first, that people in the witness protection program and similar programs were included in the register distributed outside the Agency, and second, when this fatal mistake was discovered, a new version without the sensitive identities was not distributed with instructions to destroy the old copy. Instead, the sensitive identities were pointed out and named in a second distribution with a request for all subscribers to remove these records themselves. This took place in open cleartext e-mail.
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Oh, and I think this qualifies as a Black Swan.
