As many of you may know I have posted about how the government does everything the hard way. Everything we do is usually impacted by a new rule or policy that makes our jobs harder. Over the last two days at work we have received this message or some rendition of it on our computers. This is basically telling us that we cannot use any removable media on our computers at work any more. This is going to virtually shut our office down in the short term. My office produces Power Point presentations daily. We take engineering photographs to display issues that are coming up. With this new policy we cannot unload our work related photographs or reports. Sometimes we deal with Excel spreadsheets that are so large that the government email will not allow it to go through. This leaves us with our memory stick to move files from one computer to another. We do this every day many times a day.
Although they did not post the reason for this policy, it is quite clear why they did this. It is my opinion that their reasoning is two fold and that is to prevent the spread of virus’ to government computers. The other reason is to keep people from taking restricted information outside of the government. I took this screen shot this morning because I was just amazed at these ridiculous blanket policies. We have the capability to scan these forms of removable media to check for virus and worms. There is technology that is available that can encrypt this media that must be authenticated by our government common access cards (CAC). This really should not amaze me at all because this is typical of the government to create these blanket policies to cripple everyone to punish a couple. Instead of dealing with the trouble makers they shut everyone down from doing their assigned duties.
To give you an idea of the waste that goes on in the government. If a person works in maintenance they are required to get their technical manuals or Technical Orders (TO) online. They must print them out each time they want to work on a piece of equipment. These printouts are only good for one day so they must be shredded and then reprinted the next day. This means that litterally thousands of sheets of paper are printed and shreded every day at my work. This is mandated by law. If a person is caught using a printout from yesterday then they are subject to disciplinary actions. This is typical for the government and keeps most people worked up over it all the time. I am curious how this new policy of no removable media is going to play out as I have already heard that our colenel was even complaining about it and if it is true, he has every reason.
There is not a day that goes by that almost everyone in our office is required to create an electronic report of some kind. These reports or presentations are almost always presented in a conference room on an overhead projector via PowerPoint or some other software. I am curious how this will work out since no one will be able to get their files from their computers to the conference room. One might think that we could just email it to ourselves on the other computer. That is virtually impossible since to set up our Outlook Exchange server requires administrative privilages. We would have to call the IT help desk for each person that wants to do a presentation on every computer. Web base email is out of the question because they have blocked access to all web mail accounts including Cox.net or SBCglobal. No Yahoo, No Google, No Hotmail. No social networking sites. They have even blocked access to even use CD-R’s. To the average citizen this may seem a little over kill but the the government worker this is an average day. You can add to this frustration that I received a delinquent travel voucher notice this afternoon for a temporary duty (TDY) that I took three weeks ago. By law we are required to submit our travel voucher within five working days of return. Our second level supervisor just signed it yesterday even though I submitted it the day I returned. I fulfilled my duties immediately and my second level supervisor sits on it for weeks and then I get a delinquent notice. This is typical of an average day. I think I have beat a dead horse long enough. I just had to share this information to get it off my chest. 
UPDATE: 21 Nov 2008
Thanks to KC5FM for pointing out the US-CERT web site’s warning about a malicious code being spread through USB Flash drives. I certainly hope that a fix is discovered soon as work has really been hampered. You can read the article here…
http://www.us-cert.gov/current/index.html#malicious_code_spreading_through_usb
Tags: Air Force, government, removable media, Technology
November 18th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I had the same problems working in civil service with both the Navy and the Army. The Army was much more technology adapted than the Navy. The Navy at one time in an effort to block viruses and attacks on our networks issued an order to block port 80 on all firewalls. There goes the Internet, a self-inflicted denial of service. Up until I retired the Army still allowed the use of thumbdrives as long as they were govt. issued and scanned daily. All laptops had to be encrypted due to numerous instances of PII losses. Security is getting tighter and tighter at all DoD commands and operations vs security issues will continue to be a battle.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Thanks for the post Michael. Port 80! Ouch! That is amazing that they would go to that extreme but it does not surprise me. This is why I want to get a smart phone that has dependable Internet. I cannot access Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, or any other social networking site. I just stumbled on a story on wired.com telling how the Air Force Network Operations Center has instituted a policy of blocking ALL URL's that contain the word “blog” in them. They admit that The New York Times is supposed to be reputable and you can go to those sites for information. No mention of the lack of objective reporting at the New York Times. http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/02/air-force...
Yesterday we received two emails telling us we could not use the thumb drives. A third one quoted a regulation that said we can use them as long as we run the virus scan. This morning we had the above message on the screen with two more emails repealing the last email. It said we are not to use ANY removable media under any circumstances whether it is personally owned, or DOD issued. They said there will be no waivers issued. I was thinking “HOLY COW!”. My whole office has been in an uproar over it all day. Although I do understand their concerns, surely there are more suitable ways to deal with these problems.