Ethics leaks spur House bill banning P2P apps on .gov PCs

0
November 19th, 2009

The P2P clients are very popular among the users interested in downloading illegal music, software, movies and copyright materials. Not all those who operate this software know how to setup, to have a high security level, and to prevent the loss of data. This problem apparently affected also the government employees, and classified documents were shared over the peer to peer network .At this moment, one Congressman introduced accidentally, classified data in these networks.

Error_p2p

P2P banning

The Congressman is Edolphus Towns of New York, who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In these documents are schematics of the Presidential   helicopter, and the location of a first-family safe house and also the financial records of a Supreme Court Justice.

After these incidents the Office of Management and Budget, will have 90 days to provide the rules for the government workers and contractors that have access to documents at home and the P2P software will be forbidden for usage in the government computers.

After 180 days after the bill`s passage, the OMB will have to specify the methods of detecting and purge the P2P from the Government networks. However is no guarantee that the average government employee will be more care with the security of the classified documents?

The P2P networks have a huge number of legitimate users and the filters applied to the usage of these kinds of networks will turn into a big obstacle.

Leave a Reply