United States President George Bush appreciates the importance of shredding personal documents before you throw them away: this week he ordered the creation of a new taskforce to fight identity theft. But the message, it seems, has yet to get through to his staff.
Randy Hopkins, a sanitation worker in Washington, was stunned to discover a stack of documents detailing the president’s movements that had been thrown out with the rubbish. They disclosed precise details of the arrival and departure times of Air Force One for Bush’s trip to Florida this week, along with the order of the vehicles in his motorcade and a list of all the personnel accompanying him, including the military attache who carries the ”nuclear football” allowing the president to launch a strike against an enemy.
”I saw locations and names and places where the president was going to be,” Hopkins told a local television station, Wusa. ”It shouldn’t have been in a trash hole like this … We’re going through a war, and if it fell into the wrong hands at the right time, it would have been really messy for the president’s sake.”
The White House admitted that the documents were genuine but claimed that they were unclassified. Edited versions of such itineraries, containing less information than those Hopkins found, are sometimes made available to the media, although they may not publish them.
Most US government departments use ”burn bags” to collect sensitive information for disposal in a furnace.
Last month, plans showing the interior of Air Force One had to be swiftly removed from an air force website, where they had been accessible to the public.
However, the Bush administration is by no means alone in its sometimes haphazard approach to presidential security. Bill Clinton once sped home in his motorcade, leaving the officer carrying the nuclear football — actually a black briefcase — stranded on the kerb. The officer had to walk to the White House. – Guardian Unlimited Â