The actual volume of data fits easily into a shirt-pocket drive, maybe even a thumb drive. I would hope for a maskrikova, but most crimes tend to be pretty banal and a PFC jacking into a network and snarfing up several GB of .doc or .jpg files is pretty banal. Once you’re inside the Army’s system, you are probably inside the system, and some social engineering to get into areas that you’re “not supposed” to be into is also pretty common. The PFC says he downloaded the things that he is known to have released onto his iPod, IIRC. This works just the same way.
Part of the problem is the enormous number of pieces of hay needed to find a needle when it comes to tracking down people without ID cards. I think it was JD Johannes who said the most potent weapon the military had in Iraq was the de facto census they did with digital cameras and biometrics. All of the sudden they aren’t just a bunch of simple goat herders and mechanics, they have names and home villages and the people who lie to you when their prints and pictures match someone else are suddenly far more interesting. All of that data has to be somewhere, in a convenient form for mining. That also makes it a convenient form for stealing. Typed AARs are a lot harder to steal because somehow you have to get into a secured area with a photocopier under your shirt. Digital data is easy to steal by comparison, and when you’re in a war and surrounded by urgent things, important things like data security take a back seat. The problem is that if you turn up the slider on ‘security’, you turn down ‘responsiveness’ and ‘flexibility’, TANSTAFFL still applies.
The fact that drone video and data feeds aren’t encrypted should tell you the level of security we’re dealing with here. In short, it doesn’t take a genius, it just takes a motivated a-hole like PFC Bradley and his magic iPod, may they both rest in a lime pit.
As far as not being able to try Assange for treason, a motivated Justice Department could try him for something. Might not be able to get him in front of a firing squad, but were I advising him I would suggest somewhere other than the US to scratch his PinkBerry itch.
