Man Buys an iPod, Gets Sensitive Military Data

The excitement from finding an iPod for $15 wore off very quickly for one New Zealand man. Instead of a working device that could be loaded up with jams, Chris Ogle found a broken iPod, filled with about 60 pages of U.S. military data and personally identifying information (bonus!).

The files on the iPod contain the names and demographic info of American soldiers, including some who were in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no word on exactly how many records are contained within the documents, but we know that they contain information on mission briefings and equipment deployment.

Ogle’s iPod situation is a strange on.  No one knows exactly how or why this info was stored on an iPod, or how that iPod slipped out to a used hardware vendor. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), some of the phone numbers from the iPod’s records still work, and the identified individuals indeed picked up on the other end.

“The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be [seeing],” Mr Ogle told ABC. He says he will hand the iPod over to the US Defense Department should it ever ask.

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