Fleet-footed agility and sharp thinking rarely characterise the
plodding bureaucrat. An argument can be made that different
attributes are prized: cherished incompetence, spells of
inattentiveness, and dedication to keeping things secret with
severity. What matters is not what you did, but what you
pretended to do.
Even with maintaining secrecy, the plodding desk-job hack can
face problems, all falling under the umbrella term of human
error. Papers and files can stray. The occasional USB
stick can find its way into unwanted hands. And then there is that
damnable business about the cloud and who can access it.
Despite repeated warnings over a decade by the Amsterdam-based
Mali Dili, contracted to manage email accounts of the West African
state, traffic from the US military continued to find its way to
the .ml domain, the country identifier of Mali. (For all we
know, this may still be happening.) This arose because of a
typing error, with .mil being the suffix for US military email
addresses.
Other countries also seemed caught up in the domain
confusion. Over a
dozen emails intended for the Dutch military also found their
way into the Johannes Zuurbier with .ml being confused with
.nl. Eight emails from the Australian Department of Defence,
intended for US military consumption, also met the same fate.
These include
problems about corrosion in Australias F-35 and an artillery manual
carried by command post officers for each battery.
The man most bemused by this is not, it would seem, in the
Pentagon, but a certain Dutch entrepreneur who was given the task
of managing the domain. Johannes Zuurbier has found himself
inconvenienced by the whole matter for some years. In 2023,
he decided to gather the misdirected messages. He currently
holds 117,000 of them, though he has received anywhere up to
1,000 messages a day. He has been good enough to badger
individuals in the US national cyber security service, the White
House, and the local defence attach in Mali.
The Financial Times reports
that the contents of such messages vary. Much of it is spam;
a degree of it comprises X-Rays, medical data, identity documents,
crew lists for ships, staffing names at bases, mapping on
installations, base photos, naval inspection reports, contracts,
criminal complaints against various personnel, internal
investigations on bullying claims, official travel itineraries,
bookings, tax and financial records.
While not earth shaking, one of the misdirected emails featured
the travel itinerary of General James McConville, the US Armys
Chief of Staff, whose visit to Indonesia was noted, alongsid...
