UK Site Shuts Down After Unintentionally Leaking Classified Info

March 4, 2008

A website promoting the town of Mendenhall in the U.K. has been closed after the site inadvertently and inexplicably began to receive classified emails noting the planned flightpaths of President George W. Bush.

"I was being sent everything from banal chat and jokes, to videos up to 15mb in size," Gary Sinnott, owner of mildenhall.com, told website EDP 24. "Some were classified, some were personal. A lot had some really sensitive information in them."

Although no one is saying, the mix-up and resulting problem problem might have been sparked by something in the Bush-flight path emails that cited the term Mildenhall.

As owner of mildenhall.com, Sinnott received every email that had that domain name included in the address field. The site was set up to provide information about the town of Mildenhall, which is about a half-hour's drive north east of Cambridge.

Sinnott notified the problem to U.S. Air Force officials. At first, they didn't take him seriously but then they started to realize the huge security risk.

When that happened, USAF commanders then advised Sinnott to take the site down, which he has just done.