A report of investigation by the Ethics Committee recently leaked through a p2p file sharing network!

According to Washington Post, one of the junior staff members shared the document together with his (illegal?) movies and music. While most of the internet users don’t care much about the report, it was the reply of the Ethics Committee, that outraged the peer-to-peer community. The Committee stated that:”the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on peer-to-peer software to block the improper or illegal exchange of music.” You got it? It was illegal music, that forced the guy to be stupid, enough to share a confidential work document. This staff member was fired by the way, in my opinion they should also fire the person who hired him. And to get some more over the top action they should sue his internet provider and hard drive manufacturer.

This case is really ridiculous and becomes somehow close to situations when school shootings are explained by horror movies and rock music, and not by social pressure or bad gun control laws.

By the way this is not the first case when important documents leaked into p2p networks. Just a few months ago in July 2009, CyberInsecure reported that, a major pack of FBI documents leaked through file-sharing software. The documents included FBI surveillance photos of a Mafia hit man, lists of people with HIV, and motorcade routes and safe-house locations for then-first lady Laura Bush. The FBI stated that their employees were unaware of the fact that this software shares contents of their computers. Of course FBI also blamed the dangerous p2p technology and stated that installing such software is not recommended by the Department of Homeland Security. It seems that the government workers are seriously lacking some basic computer education or at least need to pay attention to such things as manuals and readme files.

We recently posted a small list of companies that use p2p for their purposes. There are also rumors that the earliest p2p systems were used by government and military. After these two leak cases it is clear that the government either dropped the usage of such systems, or people who are working with such military systems are not familiar with this technology. Well now we know one thing for sure, if the FBI and some other government organizations have such technically lame employees it will be hard for them to bring down the global file-sharing, when the courts finally fail.

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