To Thwart Further Leaks, U.S. Military Bans USB Drives & Other Removable Disks

The sizes of these popular devices are getting smaller and smaller to detect.

In an effort to prevent the kind of intelligence leaks that are making headlines lately, the U.S. military is banning the use of removable disks among its personnel.

The servicemen and women in the Air Force and other military branches have recently been ordered to “immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand-alone machines” on Department of Defense classified networks, according to documents obtained by Wired.

This order comes a few months after a revalation by one private that he downloaded hundreds of thousands of files to a CD, labeled the disk “Lady Gaga” and turned it over to WikiLeaks. The downloaded files included the infamous footage of an Afghanistan helicopter attack and the more than 250,000 cables that have gotten WikiLeaks into so much hot water lately.

Is banning the use of removable disks the best way to stop leaks, though? As we see it, USB drives have little or nothing to do with the real problem.

As the serviceman in question, Private First Class Bradley Manning, wrote to a hacker in a late-night chat back in May, “If you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time, say, 8 to 9 months, and you saw incredible things, awful things, things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C., what would you do?”

The old adage “Loose lips sink ships” is the backbone of OPSEC, or operations security. In other words, USB drives don’t sink ships. Telephone calls don’t sink ships. Letters home don’t sink ships. OPSEC is ingrained into the mind and soul of servicemen and women as part of military training; but as long as one intelligence analyst has Manning’s attitudes and beliefs, leaks will still occur.

Then again, the real solution would be ensuring that all servicemen and women are in full accordance with the government’s and military’s means and ends or that the government’s and military’s means and ends are in no way and to no person objectionable or immoral. Neither one of those ideals seems realistic, which makes banning USB drives a lot easier than tackling the root of the problem.