From: [redacted]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 4:03 PM
To: 2-2 AVN Staff; 2-2 ASLT COs; 2-2 ASLT 1SGs
Subject: FW: Wikileaks data on Gov’t Computers & Personal Owned
Computers (UNCLASSIFIED)
Importance: High

ALCON,

Below is the guidance for viewing material on Wikileaks’ website.  To
summarize the below, the Wikileaks website is not to be viewed on a
Government computer, the information is still considered to be
classified and any computer found containing classified information
(i.e. information from Wikileaks) will confiscated and subsequently
wiped.

If there are any questions please contact the S2 office.

v/r

[redacted]
CPT, MI
2-2 AASLT BN S2

—–Original Message—–
From: [redacted]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 11:05 AM
To: [redacted]
Subject: Wikileaks data on Gov’t Computers & Personal Owned Computers
(UNCLASSIFIED)
Importance: High

BLUF: Do not view released or published classified data found on the
internet (Open Source) on unclassified Government systems OR on personal
owed systems. (See caveats)

Department of the Army policies regarding the issue can be found in AR
380-5 Information Security and AR 25-2 Information Assurance. All of the
information is still considered classified. Although now that it can be
found via open source, DOD still considers it as classified until
further notice and should not be viewed or process on a designated
unclassified government computer. Should a unclassified computer be
found containing classified information, it will need to be isolated and
wiped to remove the information.

As for viewing the information via personal computer, I have not seen
any official message traffic preventing military personnel from viewing
the information; however should a personal laptop be found with
classified information on it, it will be confiscated with the potential
for a 15-6 investigation based on the information on an unapproved
system and improper storage.

AR 380-5, Chapter 10-2 a.

and

AR 25-2

4-31. Employee-owned information systems a. Prohibit the use of
employee-owned information systems (EOISs) for classified or sensitive
information.

AR 25-2 Chapter 3-3

c. General users. Use of Government IS and access to Government networks
is a revocable privilege, not a right.

Users are the foundation of the DiD strategy and their actions affect
the most vulnerable portion of the AEI. Users must have a favorable
background investigation or hold a security clearance and access
approvals commensurate with the level of information processed or
available on the system. Users will-

(1) Comply with the command’s AUP for Government owned ISs and sign an
AUP prior to or upon account activation.

(2) Complete initial and/or annual IA training as defined in the IA
training BBP (https://informationassurance.us.army.mil
<https://informationassurance.us.army.mil/> ).

(3) Mark and safeguard files, output products, and storage media per the
classification level and disseminate them only to individuals authorized
to receive them with a valid need to know.

(4) Protect ISs and IS peripherals located in their respective areas in
accordance with physical security and data protection requirements.

(5) Practice safe network and Internet operating principles and take no
actions that threaten the integrity of the system or network.

(6) Obtain prior approval for the use of any media (for example, USB,
CD-ROM, floppy disk) from the SA/ IAM.

(7) Scan all files, attachments, and media with an approved and
installed AV product before opening a file or attachment or introducing
media into the IS.

(8) Report all known or suspected spam, chain letters, and violations of
acceptable use to the SA, IAM, or IASO.

(9) Immediately stop using an infected IS; and report suspicious,
erratic, or anomalous IS operations, and missing or added files,
services, or programs to the SA/IASO in accordance with local policy.

(10) Not disclose their individual account password or pass-phrase
authenticators.

(11) Invoke password-protected screen locks on your workstation after
not more than 15 minutes of non-use or inactivity.

(12) Logoff ISs at the end of each workday.

(13) Access only that data, control information, software, hardware, and
firmware for which the user is authorized access.

(14) Access only that data that they are authorized or have a need to
know.

Should someone have additional information regarding this issue please
send to me so I can review and disseminate.

V/r,

CPT [redacted]
BDE S2, 2 CAB, 2 ID

I’ve redacted the names in the emails; what matters is that they came from the BDE and BN S2. For those of you not in the Army, the S2 is the information security office; the bit of each unit in charge of classification, and the officer who signs as S2 is the person in charge of information security for that unit.

The policy they lay out here actually seems pretty sane to me: even though they’re threatening confiscation and erasure of personal computers discovered to have classified data on them, it’s not like they’re proposing to audit everyone’s individual PC; they’re just reiterating already extant policy. As it stands, on your own time and internet you’re perfectly free to look at this; just turn on porn mode and prevent your browser from caching anything!

I might still be driving the Saturn, but the Army wouldn’t ship it to Korea. The standard tour here is only a year; they don’t figure it’s worth shipping cars for such a short time. I extended my tour almost immediately on arrival, and gained eligibility to have a car shipped, but it was sold by then.

I almost bought a cheap ancient hoopty, as is traditional for army folks in Korea. For $500, you can get a car good enough to last you your year or two–probably. One of my friends here literally had one of his wheels fall off as he was driving down the highway last week. He was fine. The car was totaled. I was lucky, though: before I went with the hoopty, I happened to see a nice-looking sports car with a For Sale sign in the window. The price was right, and I ended up owning a 1992 Dodge Stealth.

It’s been a good car for Korea, quick and agile enough to blow through traffic while being cheap enough that I wouldn’t be devastated if it got wrecked somehow. Still, when I PCS out of here, I’m going to sell it off and upgrade. I’ve never owned a new car, but I’ve got enough in the bank to plausibly buy one outright. (I’m not particularly interested in buying the biggest car I could afford the loan of; it’d be a bad value proposition and also far too easy to drive beyond my abilities and wreck it.) It’s become a question, now, of what I want to buy, and (after much research) there are three major contenders.

The first option is a Mazda Miata, in its highest trim level, with the convertible hardtop. After throwing in all the options, it’s both the cheapest car I’m looking at and the most luxurious. The issue is power: it only runs a 4-cylinder engine displacing 2 liters, and statistically it’s just not in the same class as the others. Still, every review talks about its wonderful handling and the pure exhilaration of driving it; it also gets many bonus points for being a hardtop convertible. It’s the current leader in my mind for what to buy.

Alternately, I could go for a Nissan 370Z. Its ancestor, the 350Z, was the first car I ever looked at and thought “I really wish I owned that thing.” It’s pure beauty, power, and good reviews. The convertible version is reviewed even better, but costs more than I want to spend. Even as a coupe, it’s a car that looks fast standing still. Of course, the speed isn’t just in its looks; it goes quite nicely. The only real issue is the price: it’s the most expensive of the three. If my budget were 25% higher, there’s no question: I’d get this car as a convertible. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The last option is to go pure musclecar and buy a Ford Mustang GT. Here, the convertible version got markedly worse reviews than the coupe, so that’s not really an option. On the other hand, this is by a large margin the most powerful (and heaviest) of the cars I’m looking at. I honestly do not know how atavistic the thrill is of laying down twin rubber streaks on takeoff, and how it balances against the budget for tires; it’s one of the things I want to find out in a test drive. This car really has only two niggling and strange cons. The first is simple: I’d prefer a convertible. The second is that, of these three cars, this is the only one that actually makes me worry about driving within the car’s capabilities but not within mine and killing myself by accident.

If I worry about pushing too hard in the high end and dying, why bother with a sports car at all? It’s simple: they are fun. They are adrenaline in a shiny metal body; sexiness on wheels. They are enablers of joy: there is simply nothing like darting through medium-light traffic at twice its average speed, planning your movements three lane-changes ahead. There is much about driving in Korea that I’ll gladly forget the moment I leave, but I suspect that the sensation of freedom when the traffic finally opens up and the next obstacle is a speed camera 5 miles ahead is one I’ll treasure for a long time. I would never have experienced that in a hoopty; my ancient, base-model sports car is the only reason I have had that feeling. I can’t help but look forward to knowing what it will be like in a car that is modern and even more capable than what I have now.

NVGs are useful. I wouldn’t dream of attempting terrain flight, or landing in any but a perfectly clear well-marked area, without them. At the same time, they are an uncomfortable combination of unpleasantly heavy and way too small. After a very short while, wearing them becomes a literal pain in the neck: even with a counterweight bag to keep your head’s CG roughly where it should be, they push the moment of inertia out several inches. Combined with the tiny viewing area of the goggles, which forces you to be constantly moving your entire head around to maintain situational awareness, simple fatigue sets in very quickly.

Flying unaided is much more physically comfortable, and much prettier. Cities are a soft sodium yellow, highways are ribbons of red and white, and manmade landmarks are always strikingly lit. At the same time, navigation is significantly more challenging. For example, you wouldn’t think that a runway would be hard to find, particularly at night: it’s a perfectly straight line miles long with distinctive lighting along both edges. You’d be wrong: runways are tricky, and prone to sneaking up on you. It’s actually usually easier to find the airport from the taxiway lighting and then infer the position of the runway until you can see it directly, which usually happens on short final, about 30 seconds before landing.

The ideal, if I could invent any hypothetical technology for flying at night, would be a projected head-up display on every window showing the outside world as seen through a system of night vision sensors mounted on the aircraft’s body. I hear the Apache people actually have something like a primitive version of this, though I’ve never had a chance to play with one. I suspect that I’ll have to either wait quite a long time before such a system becomes commercially available, or invent it myself. It’s one idea for what to do with myself after the Army, at least.

Working on this has been an education. I’ve written before, but only short fiction and nonfiction, not comedy scripts. I’ve shot video before, but only in webcam/home movie contexts. I’ve never even attempted to edit video before. All I bring to the table is an active mind, a powerful computer, and a borrowed camcorder that was on the low end of the scale a decade ago.

Actually, those may well turn out to be sufficient. The basic plan was to take five times as much footage as would end up in the final cut, and spend five times as much time editing as filming; so far that’s proving an effective strategy. Still, I can’t help but sense that unless I pull several more all-nighters working on it, this thing isn’t going to be good enough.

As for what I learned today in particular, there are two major points. The first is that even though this ancient video device claims to have native support in Windows 7, it simply doesn’t appear when plugged in. It’s a good thing I have a spare old XP box lying around, or the editing process would be even more painful. Also, while transcribing these digital video cassettes is at least easier than working with analog, they still have a major drawback in comparison to solid-state storage: they only transfer their bits at 1x speed, meaning that every hour of video takes an hour to transcribe before I can begin editing. It’s an anomaly in a world in which everything else digital happens at some high multiple of realtime.

If only I got paid overtime, I could double my salary. At least I can probably show the Army that they’ve got a bargain in me.

[edit 20100531:2152]

Ok, so the actual numbers worked out like this: 2 hours filming to produce 1 hour film. 15 hours of editing later, I managed to complete this 8 minute first draft. Submitted it to the XO for review, and he said that with this quality, the maximum length should be 5 minutes. So: this draft is guaranteed to contain rare material not contained in the final release! I’ll put the final version up when it’s done; the challenge is to use the cutting to improve the overall quality.

[edit 20100531:2250]

Oh yes: I don’t expect this to be comprehensible, let alone amusing, to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the outgoing commander of 2-2 ASLT. 90% of this is in-jokes.

[edit 20100601:0437]

Final cut. If it’s not down to five minutes exactly, it’s at least less than six; it would have been very difficult to remove much else without gutting it. Enjoy!

I also learned some things:

1. I am very, very out of practice. More than four hours into the exercise, I was still debugging. The bugs were things like MSSQL Optional Feature Not Implemented, not actual logic errors, but still. That’s too long given the complexity of the task.
2. I have a lot of fun coding. In a basically unprecedented move, I was delaying leaving work until the guy whose office I was borrowing made me leave so he could lock up. Especially given that I’d had an 11 hour day at that point, this is a significant development.
3. For all that I rag on MS products, the MSSQL query designer really does take a lot of work out of the process of writing complex queries.

Actually, 90 minutes into the exercise, a civilian contractor came by and worked magic and solved the problem for which I was writing code in the first place. I kept working, using the excuse that my version will be more featureful than the Army’s, and that by having the source to it the Army will benefit. The real reason is much simpler: I’m having way too much fun to just give this project up. I am perpetually at the 50% mark and working rapidly towards completion; I’m not going to let this just escape me.

A video was posted recently by WikiLeaks. It’s gun camera footage from an Apache engagement on 12 July 2007.

The video begins with ground forces requesting support from Crazyhorse, the Apache flight. They mention a group of people, one of whom has a weapon.

It’s hard to see, because we’re looking at a low-resolution version of a low-resolution video looking at a distant target, but the guy does appear to be carrying an AK. It looks like the Apache’s found the group that the ground forces were talking about.

After identifying further members of the group, the Apaches requested and received permission to engage. Only after receiving permission did they first fire weapons. Once they had downed all targets, they stopped firing. They did not fire on the wounded. When a van arrived to evacuate the targets, they requested and received permission to engage. Only then did they disable the van.

Wikileaks is consistently referring to these men as ‘civilians.’ They may not have been uniformed military personnel, but they were definitely combatants; they may not have been currently actively engaged in a firefight, but there had been small arms fire from that area since before dawn that day. The mission of both the Apache element and the ground forces was to eliminate any insurgents and/or weapons caches from the area.

After the fact, it was discovered that two of the people killed were in fact Reuters employees, and that in the van were two children injured by the attack. Coverage of the video has focused on this. It’s tragic, but the newspeople were in the company of armed insurgents and appeared to be part of that group. As for the children, they were simply not detectable from the Apache.

It’s worth looking at the official report. (Local Cache) The results findings begin on page 11 of the PDF. The report contains necessary background information, such as the fact that the infantry less than 200 yards away had been receiving small-arms fire all morning.

There are plenty of people out there calling this a war crime, murder, and worse. That is simply not the case. There are people out there who recognize this (1, 2, 3), but they are too few.

War is a terrible thing, but this was not a crime. This was professional pilots reacting appropriately to a hostile situation. I feel sympathy for the noncombatants in the group, but they brought it upon themselves.

I can’t estimate right now my chances of actually getting that transition. Right now, it seems like the BN CDR is opposed to the notion of junior warrants transitioning straight from flight school to Korea to the FWMEQC without ever having actually deployed. However, that’s exactly the profile which the branch manager said they were looking for for these applications. I expect the BN CDR to recommend disapproval of the application; what I don’t know is whether that decision will be automatically upheld by the selection panel.

For me, the application is a pure win situation. If I don’t get in, I lose nothing. If I do get the transition and then move to a fixed-wing unit, I get qualified and experienced in a mode of flight it’d be very expensive to pay for on my own. If I get the transition but then get sent to another Black Hawk unit on its way to deployment, I still haven’t lost anything; it’s not that I dislike rotary-wing flight. I just take the expensive qualification and don’t get experienced at it.

There is one drawback: if I do get selected for the qualification course, it’ll add another year to my ADSO. I think I can live with that. Really, all the Army needs to do to keep me around for a career is keep giving me expensive and cool training in exchange for a year or two of extension at a time.

We’ll see how it goes.

Branch Managers are the people in charge of moving people around within the Army, to meet both the Army’s needs and the needs of the individuals which it is comprised of. The two in charge of all Warrant Officer Black Hawk pilots had come to Korea for the express purpose of educating us as to the exact process by which they decide where we go and which schools we attend.

This held news both good and bad for me. Good news: coming to Korea immediately after flight school was a very good thing career-wise; my peers elsewhere are often not even RL1 at this point, let alone approaching their PC checkride. Bad news: unless I get my PC qualification quickly and spend the rest of my tour here awing people with my prowess, I’m unlikely to get the IP course enroute. Good news: I’ve got an excellent chance of being assigned to Germany immediately after leaving Korea. Bad news: I’m unlikely to ever be stationed in Japan unless I stay in the Army substantially longer than I want to stay. Good news: I’m fairly likely to be sent to WOAC enroute.

The day would have been substantially improved if we could have simply skipped the morning sessions, or at least split the day in two. This morning’s showtime was 0515, and we didn’t get back to K-16 until 1910. Still, I can’t say that it was entirely a waste; the talk by the Branch Managers was well worth attending. As for the morning, if nothing else, I took away a page full of notes about how not to give a speech.

My role: open the Arms Room at 4am for the ground convoy.

So at 0350 this morning, I was on my way to the company building through the freezing rain, seemingly the only human awake within miles.

The weather’s been moody all week. It’s mostly been a frustrating kind of fog: breathtakingly atmospheric, kind of warm and comfortable, but absolutely impossible to photograph. No matter how you set the camera, the picture looks like it’s underexposed and out of focus. This morning, though, it just seemed vicious. This was the kind of weather that in a more mountainous country would demand Frankensteinian mood lightning.

As the morning wore on, things seemed to get better. Things stayed cold, but by sunrise, there was no more rain. The whole battalion was churning with pre-mission preparations. The ground convoy eventually set out to set up the ATC site and the tents. The flight crews ran up the aircraft to make sure everything was working. Half of ours turned out to have broken deicing gear, but that only meant that they couldn’t fly into observed icing conditions. We joked about the weather report: winds gusting from 30-44 knots. It’s only a joke when you know that Black Hawks are prohibited from running up or shutting down the main rotor in winds at or greater than 45 knots. Half an hour before planned takeoff, the aircraft were loaded and set. The crews gathered for a final brief.

That brief never happened. Outside, the first flakes of the first snow of the year were drifting from the sky.

For the next four hours, the situation didn’t change. We all watched movies, or watched each other, or watched the weather. The snow skirled and danced in the wind, enthusiastic in its role as winter’s leading element. Every half an hour, someone called the weather station to get an update on its predictions. They never reported a change. Every once in a while, someone called the ground convoy to see what conditions were at the destination. The only change there was the steadily increasing depth of the snow.

We made pilot jokes. “Check this out: Osan’s reporting ‘unknown precipitation.’” “What do they have, meteors?” We waited.

Eventually, the commander called everyone in. Despite the BN CDR’s enthusiasm to get out into the field, it wasn’t going to happen today. Everyone go home, get some rest. Be back at work at 6am tomorrow. New takeoff time is 9.

So we put the sensitive items away and all walked home, in the bright blue sky and the quickly vanishing snow.

Nothing, really, was all that terrible. Still, this exercise has only reinforced my impression that the Army has made an exact and precise science of determining the absolute minimal conditions that prevent reasonable complaint.