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Can this bunch possibly get any more incompetent? How dumb do you have to be to think that flash drives don't have any actual information on them?

For the one or two people who read this who might not be technically inclined, a flash drive is a little device about the size of the average thumb, that plugs into a USB port on your PC and becomes another drive -- like a floppy drive or writable CD. It's a great way to move files back and forth between home and work or between PCs.

Apparently a bunch of these drives were either improperly discarded or stolen from a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, and were found readily available to buy at Afghan markets.

Various news media, including MSNBC, have snapped these up like original Bettie Page photos:

This week, an NBC News producer, using a hidden camera, visited the bazaar and bought a half dozen of the memory drives the size of a thumb known as flash drives. On them, NBC News found highly sensitive military information, some which NBC will not reveal.

“This isn't just a loss of sensitive information,” says Lt. Col. Rick Francona (ret.), an NBC News military analyst. “This is putting U.S. troops at risk. This is a violation of operational security.”

Some of the data would be valuable to the enemy, including:

• Names and personal information for dozens of DOD interrogators;
  
• Documents on an “interrogation support cell” and interrogation methods;
  
• IDs and photos of U.S. troops.

With information like this, “You could cripple our U.S. intelligence collection capability in Afghanistan,” says Francona.

Among the photos of Americans are pictures of individuals who appear to have been tortured and killed, most too graphic to show. NBC News does not know who caused their injuries. The Pentagon would not comment on the photos.

The tiny computer memories are believed to have been smuggled off base by Afghan employees and sold to shopkeepers. Whoever buys one can simply plug it into another computer, and in a couple of minutes, see thousands of files.

Other reporters have bought drives at the bazaar containing classified information, including names and photos of Afghans spying for the U.S. and maps revealing locations of radar used to foil mortar attacks.

“This is simply appalling,” says Col. Ken Allard (ret.), an NBC News military analyst. “You've got a situation in which the U.S. is going to be forced to change an awful lot of its operational techniques.”

Uh....yeah.

The level of ignorance about basic modern computer technology that pervades the government is unbelievable. I still remember the days when wingnut Congressmen would pontificate on the halls of Congress about Communists hacking the V-chip to threaten our national security, and not much has changed. More recently, we've had $170 million blown on the failed FBI Virtual Case File system and the agency's inability to even manage to handle Google, which any PC bought at Wal-Mart and a dial-up connection can handle.

This is of course is also how companies like Diebold and ES&S manage to sell voting machines that crash in the middle of an election, necessitating techs to come in and "change the smart cards" -- which ought to decertify the machine right then and there.

It seems that if it's not technology that Blows Stuff Up, government officials still insist on being willfully ignorant about the implications of technology equipment used by your average school child. But the dangers of this ignorance can't be underestimated, as evidenced by flash drives with classified information being available at Afghan schmatte markets.