Perfect. Just absolutely perfect:

South Korea's military said Friday it was investigating a hacking attack that netted secret defense plans with the United States and may have been carried out by North Korea. The suspected hacking occurred late last month when a South Korean officer failed to remove a USB device when he switched a military computer from a restricted-access intranet to the Internet, Defense Ministry spokesman Won Tae-jae said. The USB device contained a summary of plans for military operations by South Korean and U.S. troops in case of war on the Korean peninsula.

Now the real question is whether "not disconnecting a USB drive" is dumber than the all but willful neglect that led to Iranian-backed terrorists grabbing realtime video feeds from our Predators. In that story - which broke yesterday - the Pentagon had long known that our downlinks could be cracked by anyone with off-the-shelf software. And by "long known" I mean "known since Bosnia" and by "off-the-shelf" I mean "$26." Which is exactly what happened:

"Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds... [This points] to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington's growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan." -- Gee, you think? Don't get me wrong; I'm no military genius or anything, but it seems to me that one particular task at the Pentagon should be to make sure that our enemies don't have real-time access to our Predator video feeds. We've used encrypted and frequency-hopping communications systems for decades now. No one thought to apply that technology to drone communications?

Hey, I don't mean to make a big deal about this. But it's not at all clear that we're winning right now. There's the vulnerability of modern society to asymmetric warfare, and then there's the stupidity of individuals, large bureaucracies, and individuals within large bureaucracies. They're both pretty bad. But it's really hard to do something about the warfare thing when the stupidity part keeps getting in the way.

And what the hell are war plans doing on a jump drive to begin with?

References:
* Hackers steal SKorean-US military secrets [AP]
* Great news: Iranian-backed terrorists hacked US drone video feeds [Hot Air]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* Military News
* North Korea
* Iran