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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-the-cabinet-was-locked-your-Honour! dept.

Filing cabinets containing thousands of classified documents from the Australian government ended up being sold at a secondhand shop, prompting government officials Wednesday to launch an investigation into how the highly sensitive documents were disposed of.

The cache of documents was obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which reported the two cabinets were sold by a Canberra furniture shop at a discount price because they were locked and no one could find keys." http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/01/31/top-secret-files-left-in-filing-cabinets-sold-at-second-hand-shop.html

Nearly all the files are classified, some as "top secret" or "AUSTEO", which means they are to be seen by Australian eyes only.

But the ex-government furniture sale was not limited to Australians — anyone could make a purchase. And had they been inclined, there was nothing stopping them handing the contents to a foreign agent or government.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:23PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:23PM (#631604)

    I doubt the cabinets in a fox news story are related. They look like ordinary cabinets.

    At least in the USA, the cabinets are some serious shit. You could call them safes. Some of them weigh 600 pounds empty. Most of the metal is about 1/8 inch thick. The lock drives a 1-inch-diameter hardened steel bar into the sides.

    The lock is an X-09, which is a weird electronic spin combo lock. You operate it mostly like an old-style spin lock, but with a few weird differences. To operate, first you spin it maybe a dozen times in order to generate electrical power. Then you enter the combo. You view the combo by looking down at a tiny window on top, making it hard for other people to see. Each time you change direction, the display jumps to a random starting number. If you make too many attempts, it delays you for a while. If you are "too perfect", like an R2D2 robot breaking into a shield generator on a forest moon, it delays you for a while. The lock is pretty much designed to piss people off. Usually, each drawer has its own lock.

    Drilling to get into the safe is awful. We had it done. It takes 8 hours and wears out 2 tungsten-carbide hole cutter bits. Meanwhile, since the person drilling is unlikely to have authorization to look inside the cabinet, some other miserable person has to sit there (likely in a cramped little room with no internet or phone) with their ears plugged. After 8 hours of loud drilling, you get to open the filing cabinet.

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:44PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:44PM (#631612)

    "We discovered that we could cut a lot of hassle and expense by changing this cumbersome storage, and uploaded all those docs to The Cloud. Coincidentally, my brother-in-law and nephew just started a company providing Cloud services for about half of the price of AWS or Azure"

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:24PM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:24PM (#631663) Journal

    I once bought a truck load of government surplus desks from a state government to use in a computer training lab.
    The State had got them from the Navy. Built like battle ships. Four guys to loan each desk onto the truck.
    No papers inside, secret or otherwise.

    Another time we got a pallet of computers from same state government surplus. They were said to have
    no hard drives for confidentiality reasons. But they all had de-cabled hard drives inside, which booted up just
    fine when re-cabled. Lots of interesting things on them. Some porn. Lots of email and documents.
    All boring stuff.

    The drives were too small for our purpose, so we sledge-hammerd them and installed new ones.
    Never even bothered to tell the State. No reason to get someone fired. All sales final.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.