OMG! LOL!
I bet GIs all over the world are laughing too.
The guy (owner of the mildenhall.com domain), and the totally ignorant reporter, and editors that let that get published are all, simply, uninformed and totally naive.
I maintained Air Force communications systems for 24 years while active duty (including 4 years at RAF Mildenhall, coincidently), plus another 10 years working DoD secure communications after I retired from the Air Force.
First, the obvious. The article said,
Quote:
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Confidential US Air Force (USAF) e-mails, some including flight plans for a presidential visit, have been mistakenly sent to a tourism website. The e-mails were meant to go to the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, via its website.
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That's plain bullhocky!
ALL "Official" websites for USAF bases are in the .af.mil domain - including
RAF Mildenhall's. "Official" websites,
and and official email addresses too, for the military are
not on a .com domain. Therefore, if he got jokes and military information sent to him by mistake, it was not "official" but most likely friends and family sending jokes and letters back and forth, and
by habit, used @Mildenhall.com instead of @mildenhall.af.mil.
Official emails with military information would be totally automated - and not go to a wrong address. I do not know about the other branches of the US military, but I know for fact that
all Air Force members have an official email address. I am about 99% certain, the other services do that too.
And come on! Confidential??? Yeah. Like classified messages are going to be sent "in the clear" (not encrypted) to a public IP???
And Presidential flight-plans??? Let's be real. I might,
might, believe "itinerary" for a "Presidential
visit". But that would be released to the public by the "Public Affairs Office" anyway.
And Air Force One is NOT a civilian aircraft, but a military aircraft. All military flight plans would be considered "sensitive". Flight plans are filed shortly before departure and can change during flight due to weather and other circumstances. The US is not responsible for the skies over the UK - meaning, the MOT (I assume) does, in cooperation with the MOD. That flight plan data did change hands many times, so there are several opportunities for "leaks". But controlling the flight, and protecting data about the flight of "high priority assets" is something these agencies are well trained and experienced to do, and they do it well.
That said, when falling out the sky towards the Earth, some call it landing, it is usually best to line up on one end, or the other of the runway - meaning flight "paths", once the craft descends into the local area, are fairly common knowledge.
And what does spam have to any with anything? If you give out your address, you will get spam!
Like many RAF and USAF bases around the world, when you leave the gates of the base, you cross into the town that "hosts" that base. In this case, you cross into the little town of Mildenhall. The odds are good, if the Internet is in town, there's a town.com website. So I am certain emails from friends and family get sent to the wrong domain all the time. But again, one AF agency sending an "official" communication to another AF agency is not likely to end up being sent to a civilian IP address. There are just too many checkpoints and stop gaps to prevent that, especially with classified information, even by accident.
I certainly believe he got tons of spam, jokes, and even some personal information, and maybe even what he thinks was important military information. But none of it was official.
