And here we thought “breaches” were really nice pants. Turns out that in the secretive world of British Intelligence, it’s something completely different…and it’s not nice at all.
DOWN THE TUBE
A British cabinet member (name withheld) often commuted on the London Underground subway and passed the time by reading work documents. One day in June 2008, he was going over the latest version of the government’s top-secret Al-Qaeda profile…and left it on the train. A passenger turned it in, not to the authorities, but to the BBC. The news agency reported the find online, and added that it would be “tragic” if the documents had fallen into the wrong hands.
In 2009, when Sir John Sawyer was appointed head of MI6, the British government’s spy agency, his wife, Shelley, posted the good news on her Facebook page. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sawyer hadn’t enabled any of the social networking site’s privacy features, meaning that anyone with Internet access could see her page, which contained sensitive information about her and her husband, including where they lived, places they frequently visited, and photos of their children. After the leak was discovered, Mrs. Sawyer hastily made her Facebook page accessible to “friends” only.
An English postal worker bought a digital camera on eBay in September 2008 for about $30 U.S. After he’d used it a few times, he looked through the camera’s memory and found, along with his vacation pictures, photographs of terrorist leaders, missiles, rockets, fingerprints, and snapshots of documents detailing a spy computer system that were so revealing that they could have been used to hack into the network. The postal worker contacted the British government, and after he was interrogated for a few hours and released, he was told that he’d accidentally been sold a camera used by an MI6 agent, whose name was never released to the public.
Trash for the ages: A glass bottle can take as long as 4,000 years to decompose.