Tuesday, February 16, 1999 - 1:40 p.m.
Presenter: Mr. Kenneth H. Bacon, ASD PA
Q: There's been some reporting recently on how the Pentagon has revamped its World Wide Web sites to restrict the kinds and the amounts of information available to the public. Some critics have said that you've gone overboard on that, gone too far. How do you respond to that criticism?
A: Well, we're trying not to go too far. The point of the directive was to try to avoid putting out information that could be particularly useful to people who might have nefarious plans for the military. Some commands, for instance, put fairly detailed building plans of headquarters buildings on the Web, and security people felt this might invite thieves or terrorists to look at these buildings. So we've made an effort for fairly common sense security reasons to strip out certain types of information.
I'll give you another example that's very simple. Using information on the Web, it's frequently possible to trace down where people live or to trace down certain financial information about people, and it turns out that if you make relatively small changes in the type of information that's put into biographies, you can make this much more difficult -- if you take out specific birth dates, for instance, and just put in the birth year rather than the specific birth date.
Some information carries either whole social security numbers or parts of social security numbers that got onto the Web, and obviously social security numbers can be the key to unraveling personal finances for people. So we've made an effort to try to clean up some of those.
I'm sure that the directive has been implemented with varying degrees of zeal by commands around the country. The idea was to try to get the proper balance between using the Web in ways that are helpful to everybody on the one hand, and not giving away information that can compromise personal or unit security on the other hand. It may take us a little bit of time to achieve that balance, but that's what we're trying to do.
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