Generals And Majors Uh Huh

People who have served in the military will usually tell you that it's hard to get the attention of the top brass, especially when you have a problem to report. 

Probably, the problem is that they don't want to hear about problems.

But someone should have told them ten years ago that millions of US military emails have been erroneously sent to Mali, which is a country in West Africa.  A country which has allied itself with Russia.

Why are our corporals and admirals and grand Pooh-Bahs sending emails that contain medical records, personnel ID info, staff lists from military bases, secret photos of military bases, naval inspection reports, Navy vessel crew lists, personal tax records, and so on to Mali?

It's because of a typo that has been typoed hundreds of thousands of times.

You see, military people, instead of addressing their emails to, say, "CampSwampy.mil," people are addressing things to "CampSwampy.ml". "MIL" is the proper suffix for military addresses, while "ML" is the suffix for Mali.

Mali's domain is managed by Johannes Zuurbier, who is a Dutch entrepreneur. When he started seeing these misdirected emails, he tried to warn the US military, but got no answer. He then set up a sieve on the computer to catch these mistakes, but there were so many, according to the Financial Times, that the boo-boo catcher  “was rapidly overwhelmed and stopped collecting messages.”

Just this year along, Mr Zuurbier says he has collected 117,000 wrongly addressed emails, and he says some of them contain sensitive military information.

And...he has had a contract with the Mali government to run their email. The contract runs out on Monday, after which local authorities will have access to all these wrong emails.

Did I mention that Mali is allied with Russia? Russia and Mali are connected through the Wagner Group, that state-backed Russian paramilitary group that's been in the news lately for trying to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

But don't worry. The military is on top of it.

“The Department of Defense (DoD) is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously,” says Tim Gorman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

I know I feel better now!