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Military Laptops For Sale on Pakistan's Black Market
By Nathan Hodge
February 13, 2009
Peshawar, Pakistan, has always had a reputation as a smuggler's paradise, the perfect place to score a 3,000 rupee Kalashnikov knockoff, a rusty Lee-Enfield or a nice block of hash. And as GlobalPost correspondent Shahan Mufti discovered, it's also a place where you can buy some off-the-shelf U.S. military equipment.
Mufti recently paid a visit to the Sitara Market on the city's western edge, and was able to pick up a ruggedized U.S. military laptop for $650. The laptop, which looks like it is part of a vehicle diagnostics kit, came with clear U.S. military markings. According to the story, the laptop also stored "identities of numerous military personnel and information about weaknesses and flaws in American military vehicles being employed in the war in Afghanistan."
Peshawar is just down the road from the Khyber Pass, which has become a crucial bottleneck for supplying U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In December, militants torched over 100 trucks at a supply depot in Peshawar; earlier this month, militants blew a bridge along the route. A Pentagon spokesman told GlobalPost that the supply line from Karachi to the Khyber Pass had seen a fairly constant amount of pilferage or losses as trucks driven by civilian contractors are attacked or looted, although he added that computers with sensitive information are typically not trucked through Pakistan.
It's not clear whether the laptop obtained by GlobalPost has any actual classified data stored on it -- but it certainly looks like sensitive information has the potential to fall in the wrong hands. Precarious security on the Khyber Pass route is one of the reasons the U.S. and NATO are looking for alternate ways to resupply Afghanistan.
This story, incidentally, is a nice scoop for GlobalPost, the recently launched Web-based international news service. GlobalPost was founded in response to diminishing international news coverage; this story, one hopes, is a good example of the kind of reporting their network of correspondents will deliver.
By Nathan Hodge
February 13, 2009
Peshawar, Pakistan, has always had a reputation as a smuggler's paradise, the perfect place to score a 3,000 rupee Kalashnikov knockoff, a rusty Lee-Enfield or a nice block of hash. And as GlobalPost correspondent Shahan Mufti discovered, it's also a place where you can buy some off-the-shelf U.S. military equipment.
Mufti recently paid a visit to the Sitara Market on the city's western edge, and was able to pick up a ruggedized U.S. military laptop for $650. The laptop, which looks like it is part of a vehicle diagnostics kit, came with clear U.S. military markings. According to the story, the laptop also stored "identities of numerous military personnel and information about weaknesses and flaws in American military vehicles being employed in the war in Afghanistan."
Peshawar is just down the road from the Khyber Pass, which has become a crucial bottleneck for supplying U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In December, militants torched over 100 trucks at a supply depot in Peshawar; earlier this month, militants blew a bridge along the route. A Pentagon spokesman told GlobalPost that the supply line from Karachi to the Khyber Pass had seen a fairly constant amount of pilferage or losses as trucks driven by civilian contractors are attacked or looted, although he added that computers with sensitive information are typically not trucked through Pakistan.
It's not clear whether the laptop obtained by GlobalPost has any actual classified data stored on it -- but it certainly looks like sensitive information has the potential to fall in the wrong hands. Precarious security on the Khyber Pass route is one of the reasons the U.S. and NATO are looking for alternate ways to resupply Afghanistan.
This story, incidentally, is a nice scoop for GlobalPost, the recently launched Web-based international news service. GlobalPost was founded in response to diminishing international news coverage; this story, one hopes, is a good example of the kind of reporting their network of correspondents will deliver.
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