You are here: Home » Featured » Pentagon DADT Survey Poorly Secured, Rife For Corruption

Pentagon DADT Survey Poorly Secured, Rife For Corruption

07/20/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
The survey sent out by the Pentagon regarding Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell may be a major security risk in and of itself. Apparently, the survey is not properly secured. Even compared to your average MMORPG, this survey is laughably insecure. There are no safeguards and no safety checks to make sure that one person is not taking the survey multiple times, and even people who can gain access to the survey can do so without being in the military. Basically, the system is less secure than a block of Swiss cheese.

The biggest problem appears to be the fact that a single person is able to get multiple pin numbers in order to access the survey. While the survey will only operate under one pin, apparently, the process for getting a pin allows for a person to gain access to multiple pins.

According to John Aravosis at Americablog, “I was able to get three different PIN numbers to gain access to the online chat part of the survey three times, as three different people. Two of those times I was on the same computer, meaning there are no adequate safeguards to stop people from taking the survey multiple times – hell, I was logged in to the two surveys at the same time.” Aravosis even had a child take the survey, and that child talked to one of the people at Westat afterwards via chat. Apparently, this also opens up the ability for DoD civilian employees to take the survey in direct violation of the stated purpose. According to the Pentagon, this is suppose to be limited to active duty and reserve servicemembers and not accessible to anyone who is a civilian employee.

The problem, often confronted by schools that are going more and more online, is how to stop cheating. This survey does not even appear to have tried very hard to make sure that there could not be any cheating what so ever.

A Pentagon spokeswoman contacted Aravosis to clarify that the online chat after the survey was not officially part of the survey, but rather a confidential dialogue that they developed so that they could have confidential communications between servicemembers and Westat. The online chat was instituted to help reach out to lesbian and gay servicemembers who might not be comfortable using their DoD computers to do the survey. The online chat could be done on any computer, and supposedly the survey cannot. Unfortunately, the survey set up is so corrupt that it means that anyone can fix the results by taking the survey multiple times, such as a homophobe or several homophobes who want to influence this. The spokeswoman stated that this is not a referendum on the repeal of DADT. Which means that either they did not need to do this survey and should have saved the money or they should have not told the troops that their opinions were worthless anyway.

It is not impossible to create a program where one puts in their ID number, gets a blind pin that is not recorded, and that ID number is locked out unless unlocked by a special request, and only if that person has not taken the survey before that request is processed. What this shows is that Westat created a survey structure which is not only badly designed, but badly implemented and they should be returning the money that they took to create it.

At this point, the results of this survey are bogus and bunk. There is nothing useful that can be gained from it because nothing has been done to prevent this from being corrupted.