P2P networks harm national security

Politicians charged last week that peer-to-peer networks can pose a "national security threat" because they enable federal employees to share sensitive or classified documents accidentally from their computers.

 

Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was troubled by the possibility that foreign governments, terrorists or organized crime could gain access to documents that reveal national secrets. As a result new laws are aimed at addressing the problem.

Earlier this year, the Department of Transportation experienced an incident in which an employee's daughter installed LimeWire on the home computer that her mother occasionally uses for telework and misconfigured it in such a way that documents from the department and the National Archives were open to others using the network, including a Fox News reporter. As a result, Mark Gorton, the chairman of Lime Wire, which makes the peer-to-peer software LimeWire, was assailed for allegedly harming national security through offering his product.

"A lot of the information that gets out there now is because people accidentally share directories that they wouldn't mean to share clearly," Gorton said. "Those warnings are not enough, at least in a handful of cases."

"Even when people...are sophisticated with computers, they can still make a mistake, and all that material can be gone in an instant," the former Democratic presidential candidate told the committee.