Canadian Students Buy Sensitive US Defense Info for $40 in Ghana

by Tina Kells | June 24, 2009 at 09:15 am

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A group of Canadian journalism graduate students from the University of British Columbia (UBC) were able to buy sensitive US defense information for $40CAN from a company that deals in discarded North American computer hardware.

UBC grad school students Blake Sifton, Heba Elasaad, Krysia Collyer, and their professor Dan McKinney were in Ghana making a student documentary titled Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground when they made the startling discovery.

The sensitive data was found on a computer hard drive that had once belonged to Northrop Grumman, a Pentagon contractor. Northrop Grumman sent the computers away for disposal without first wiping the hard drive clean.

The team bought seven hard drives at a bustling market in Tema, a major port near the capital city of Accra where a lot of electronic waste from Europe and North America enters Africa. One of the unformatted drives contained personal information and photos from a family in the U.K. Another was from New Zealand, and another contained the U.S. security data.

Special skills or software weren't required to access the data, said Peter Klein, who teaches the international reporting course and supervised the documentary project.

"We plugged them in and started reading files …. They were just sitting there."

Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground was aired June 23, 2009 as the final episode of the season's PBS documentary series Frontline/World. The original focus of the documentary was to expose the problem of e-waste from the West making its way to landfills and marketplaces in third world nations. The export of e-waste is technically banned under international treaties.

Northrop Grumman declined comment on the findings but did announce that it was looking into the security breach. The US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon are also seeking answers as to how the computer hard drive with sensitive national security information on multi-million dollar government contracts ended up for sale in a Ghana market for $40CAN.

"It's pretty shocking," said Blake Sifton, one of three UBC graduate journalism students who purchased the device containing information related to contracts between the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and military contractor Northrop Grumman. The hard drive cost the students just $40.

"You'd think a security contractor that constantly deals with very secret proprietary information would probably want to wipe their drives," Sifton said Tuesday.