Mullen's Thumb Drive Road Show

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seems to be using trips to bases nationwide to reinforce his view on thumb drives and removable media.

In the process, he is dribbling out piecemeal information about the reasons for the ban that the Defense Department previously did not acknowledge. This month, Mullen told soldiers at Fort Drum, N.Y., that the ban was instituted because of "contamination of some of our classified networks, because we moved thumb droves illegally from our unclassified side to our classified side."

On Feb. 19, according to Stars and Stripes, Mullen expanded on this comment, identifying thumb drives as the potential source of computer worms in classified Defense networks and systems. "One of the ways these worms move around is you just take your thumb drive, which is in your unclassified computer, and all you gotta do is plug it into a classified computer," Mullen said

Maybe if Mullen visits enough bases, the full thumb drive story will eventually come out.

Mullen told Fort Campbell soldiers -- like he did those at Fort Drum -- that he did not see the return of the handy but dangerous thumb drives to Defense networks anytime soon. "I do not see the thumb drives going back here in the immediate future," he said.