Sensitive Information? Read the Budget

It's amazing what I can find trolling through thousands of pages of budget documents. Like this one: the location of a highly sensitive system.

Be warned that in the era of plain old Google and Google Earth any small hint of a system's location will lead any reasonably good searchmeister right to it.

I did that on Wednesday when an agency I will leave unnamed put the building number in its fiscal 2011 budget documents where it planned to install an unbelievably sensitive system. It did not include the city or street name.

I fired up Google, typed in the name of the agency and the building number, and in less than a minute had the name of the installation where the building was located, the city, the street number and the zip code. I then cranked all that information into Google Earth, fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and was then looking into that building's front door.

This is open source intelligence, and if I could find the building, so, I imagine, can any number of bad guys. I'm not disclosing the name of the agency, building or system, but I did send them a note about what I considered a rather serious OPSEC flub.

I'm really sensitive to this kind of stuff. In 1998, while on assignment for Federal Computer Week in Bosnia, I was captured by a U.S. Army rifle platoon after a seemingly innocent trip to a remote hilltop to do a telemedicine story.

Army Lt. Col. Jim Cronin, the public affairs officer in Tuzla, Bosnia, at the time, told me I could take all the photos I wanted, and so I snapped merrily away, including many shots of some really weird radio antennas.

Turns out that the weird antennas belonged to, shh, an outfit headquartered at Fort Meade, Md. As a result, the Army dispatched four Humvees to capture me.

Oh yeah, they wanted the film, which I did not give them. (Nowadays, I don't need my own film, just Google Earth.)

Cronin tried to explain it all away by telling me "we had a slow peacekeeping day."