French government bans Blackberrys

It seems that the French government has decided that Blackberrys are a security risk, and has banned their use by government officials. The reason is that all of Blackberry's servers reside in the US and the UK. The French government claims that having the servers on foreign soil is a security risk because sensitive government data is passing through them. Unfortunately the ban hasn't been working very well so far. Reports are coming in that many French officials are still using their Blackberrys in secret. The claim is that the French government has not given them a usable alternative.

BBC News: Blackberry ban for French elite via Engadget

Military secrets hidden in porn collection

Sometimes people are just too stupid for their own good. It seems that some officers in the Japanese defense forces decided that storing top secret documents in with their porn collections was a good idea. Those collections were later shared with other officers who did not have clearance for the classified information. No one noticed until later that the top secret documents were in the same folder with the porn.
There are so many things wrong with this situation.
Why in the world did they think that their porn collection was a good place to hide secret documents? If a hacker ever got a hold of one of those computers you can be sure they would at least look at the porn folders.
Why were the officers keeping their collections on military computers in the first place? Seems like your own personal documents and porn collections shouldn't be on government computers in the first place.
Why were the classified documents not encrypted in some way? Really, having them in the clear is a big security risk.
I would say that the Japanese military is obviously not very good at protecting secrets, but here in the US we seem to be just as stupid. It seems that the National Nuclear Security Agency whose job is to protect our nuclear secrets lost a whole bunch of its desktop computers recently.

Check out the story: Porn swap tied to Aegis info leak

Intern selling stolen Civil war documents on Ebay

Denning McTague, an antiques and rare books dealer was interning for the national Archives in Philadelphia last summer. It seems that while he was working there, he walked out with at least 165 civil war documents. Including the official War Department's announcement of President Lincoln's death. He then sold them on Ebay to private collectors. It seems that one of the items he sold, aroused suspicion and got the FBI involved in an investigation. McTague was working with the Archives arranging and organizing documents for the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
He's now been caught and arrested, but has been cooperating with law enforcement on retrieving the items he stole. Most of the documents have been retrieved already.

What caught me about this story, was how he was able to simply walk out of the archives taking the documents. He wasn't caught stealing them, he was caught after the fact when he was selling them. Seems like the Archives should have had better security and accounting of it's documents.

The guy has a website where he sells books, but the site seems to be down. I'm not sure if that is because of the extra traffic this story has generated, or because he took the site down himself.
Check out his site here assuming that it ever comes back up,
and the story here