Cage fighter: Coast Guard Petty Officer Dave Stahl prepares for the ring

Petty Officer 2nd Class Dave Stahl poses for a portrait at the Fifth Coast Guard District headquarters in Portsmouth, Va., Feb. 5, 2009. Stahl, an administrative assistant for the Coast Guard Investigative Service spends his off-duty time training as a mixed-martial-arts fighter. (U.S. Coast Guard photo / Petty Officer 3rd Class Mark Jones)

Story and photos by PA3 Mark Jones

Fifth District Public Affairs
U.S. Coast Guard

Most evenings at Global Martial Arts in Virginia Beach, Va., the room is filled with the sound of fighters striking heavy bags, instructors coaching students on technique, and a pervasive air of determination amid martial artists pushing themselves to attain expertise in combat fighting.

Some of the necessary qualities for success as a fighter are continuous readiness, diligence, and a can-do attitude.

These valuable qualities and others equally important can be acquired in many ways, but in the case of Petty Officer 2^nd Class Dave Stahl, much of it came from his experiences in the Coast Guard before he began training in the martial arts. This determination and attitude serves him well when he’s locked in a cage with another man intent on knocking him unconscious.

Stahl, a yeoman for the Coast Guard Investigative Service in Portsmouth, Va., is an amateur mixed martial arts fighter.

Mixed-martial-arts fighting is a sport with origins as far back as the ancient Grecian Olympic Games where “Pankration,” which literally means “all powers” and involved a combination of boxing and wrestling styles, was the most popular event. It has also found venues in various forms around the world throughout history. Its mainstream attention as a modern sport arose recently with the popularity of televised competitions such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Many of these competitions originally had very few rules or restrictions, banning only such acts as biting, eye-gouging, and other flagrantly unsportsmanlike techniques. Fights typically went on without time limits until one competitor submitted or the other fighter knocked him out.

Coast Guard Shuts Down MWR Survey Page with PII

This evening the link to the survey data contained in ALCOAST 124/09 has been taken down.  This morning at approximately 0900, the document was updated to remove the PII.  ALCOAST 217/08 said

ANY QUESTIONS REGARDING THIS SURVEY MAY BE ADDRESSED TO MR. GARY SCHEER, CG DIRECTOR MWR AT (757) 420-2480, EXT. 3035 OR GARY.S.SCHEER(AT)USCG.MIL.

So we contacted Mr. Gary Scheer, Director of Coast Guard MWR programs for comment on this story Sunday, he did not respond.

Title 18,4 – Misprision of a Felony – Are ICGS and the Coast Guard guilty?

by Michael DeKort

“Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Basically this means it is a felony to not report knowledge of a felony.

In this case the felonies being fraud and the following felonies related to the TEMPEST violations, illegal waivers and use of the secure communications systems on the 123s.
Title 18, 793 – Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information
Title 18, 798 – Disclosure of classified information

Isn’t the leadership of Lockheed and the Coast Guard in potential violation of this? Especially the Coast Guard for accepting things they should not have, participating in the cover up and using classified systems they knew did not meet critical security regulations?

GUILTY PLEA IN CASE OF COSCO BUSAN SHIP PILOT

WASHINGTON— John Joseph Cota, a California ship pilot, pleaded guilty today to negligently causing the discharge of approximately 53,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay in violation of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, a law enacted in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster.  Cota, who piloted the M/V Cosco Busan when it hit the San Francisco Bay Bridge on Nov. 7, 2007, also pleaded guilty today to violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for the death of protected migratory birds.

If the plea terms are  accepted by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, Cota will be sentenced to serve between two and ten months in prison and be fined between $3,000 to $30,000.  The exact sentence will be determined by the court with the government reserving the right to argue for the highest sentence within this range.  The plea also requires Cota to serve the maximum one year of supervised release during which he will not serve as a ship pilot or ship Captain (Master).  Sentencing has been scheduled for June 19, 2009. 

Coast Guard Slow to Respond to PII Breach

This morning at approximately 0900, some 24 hours after our first attempt to work with Coast Guard on a possible PII Breach, the document in question was taken down.  After scrubbing the document of all PII it was re-posted.  As one comment posted by Douglas Gould said

HOWEVER, manually copy and pasting http://WWW.USCG.MIL/MWR/DOCS/MWRDATA.XLS into my browser does open window that offers to save or download a .xls document. That document most definitely contains private data, like person’s name, age and rank! I have it on my computer now.

The question is how many other people downloaded the document in the more than 24 hours that it was posted to the Internet.  What would be great is some means for the public to contact the Coast Guard Computer Incident Response Team.  Even after spending hours trying to work LCDR Tony Russell (Commandant Press Secretary),  LCDR Tony Soliz (CG-092) and then Coast Guard Headquarters Command Center, it still took 24 hours to resolve this breach.

Finally in the 11th hour we contacted our point of contact in Congressman Elijah Cummings office.  This is not how this should have played out.  Is Coast Guards policy on working only with “friendly Blogs” so overpowering that they would allow a PII breach to loom for 24 hours?  That question will be asked by leaders on the Hill.

Coast Guard employees should have some warning if thier names, ranks, civilian paygrades, ages and other PII are going to be made public.

Did Coast Guard MWR Survey Results Breach PII Regulations – You Decide

We were writing a story on a completely unrelated topic to PII compromises when we started out Sunda, but that turned south when found approximately 400 Coast Guard employees names, ages, ranks, civilian grades, units, e-mail and other “Personally Identifiable Information” on the Headquarters Site of CG-103.

ALCOAST 124/09 announced the results of the Coast Guard Morale, Well-Being, and Recreation Survey announced by ALCOAST 217/08 in May 2008.  A link in ALCOAST 124 to data from the survey contained the PII.

THE RESULTS OF THE SURVEY CONTAIN A WEALTH OF DATA THAT MAY BE USED BY COMMANDS TO IMPROVE THEIR LOCAL MWR PROGRAMS. A COMPLETE COMPILATION OF THE SURVEY RESULTS MAY BE FOUND AT THE COMDT (CG-103) MWR WEB SITE AT WWW.USCG.MIL/MWR/DOCS/MWRDATA.XLS.

Nothing in ALCOAST 217/08 indicated that when the results were published that names, ages, and other information given by the employee would be made public.  I spoke with several employees who took the survey on Sunday, none remembered seeing any notice while taking the survey that their names would be made public.  “I don’t recall seeing anything but I took that thing (survey) last summer.”  So the question is did Coast Guard Personnel taking an on-line survey at the request of “Coast Guard Morale, Well-Being, and Recreation,” CG-103 inadvertently give Personally Identifiable Information about the themselves to be published on the WEB.

It took us over 8 hours to get Coast Guard to respond to our concern of a PII Breach.  In total we made 4 attempts at notifying the Coast Guard of what appears to be a PII Breach, if not a breach of trust and confidentiality with their employees.  Our last e-mail to the Headquarters Command Center at 1756 the evening of the 8th of March asked if they would like us to hold of on this story.  Coast Guard did not respond at press time today.

Commandant Instruction 5260.5 – Subj: PRIVACY INCIDENT RESPONSE, NOTIFICATION, AND REPORTING PROCEDURES FOR PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION (PII) says

Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Data that can be used to distinguish or trace a person’s identity, or any other personal information that can be linked to a specific individual. Examples of PII include: name, date of birth, home mailing address, telephone number, social security number, home e-mail address, zip code, account numbers, certificate/license numbers, vehicle identifiers (including license plates), uniform resource locators (URLs), Internet protocol addresses, biometric identifiers (e.g., fingerprints), photographic facial images, any unique identifying number or characteristic, and other information where it is reasonably foreseeable that the information will be linked with other personal identifiers of the individual.

If the Coast Guard doesn’t consider the information contained in the survey to be PII, we question why they would not say so.  The link to the survey is still active 21 hours after our first notification of concern.

Is the potential there for identity theft?  You decide.

The last question we have is why it took nearly 9 months to publish the results of a survey that ended on May 15th, 2008?  That’s part of the story we originally set out cover.

The Captain’s Journal Blocked in Afghanistan

Herschel Smith’s post at the Captain’s Journal caught our eye and we have published an excerpt of it below.  Visit the Captain’s Journal for the entire post and list of other Blogs blocked by the U.S. Army.

Joshua Foust and I were engaging in some friendly jousting over a few articles we had written (and found much more on which to agree than disagree), and some interesting information came to light.  You see, Joshua is currently in Afghanistan, and he responded to me that he couldn’t get to my web site as it was locally blocked by S6 (or otherwise CJ6 or J6, which is Army IT Staff).

I immediately copied the article into an e-mail and sent it on its way, but only later did the importance what Joshua said dawn on me.  Pressing him for more data and information, Josh responded with an article of his own.  The results of his little investigation are striking.

Blackfive is blocked, as is Abu Muqawama, Global Guerrillas, and our very own The Captain’s Journal.  This list is not comprehensive.  Allowed are Small Wars Journal, The Long War Journal, and rather interestingly, Bouhammer, whose URL has the word ‘blog’ in it.  I use WordPress to create articles, but I am not associated with WordPress and the Army would have no way of knowing what software I use.