Life is hard. It is harder if you are stupid.
George V. Higgins, 1970
Cadets are not stupid. They can, however, do incredibly ignorant stuff that appears, in retrospect, to be very unwise. The backup system exposed some of this ignorance. Some real life vignettes:
- Two consenting cadets who are about to graduate and get married, while on leave, film themselves having sex multiple times over a weekend. Ok. One of the cadets decides to store the movies on his laptop desktop perhaps as the fond promise of things to come. Not ok. Password protect it. Encrypt it. Do not put it on your desktop where it is easy to find by, say, your roommate who cadet borrows your laptop and then emails the videos to everyone in your class. It almost breaks the network as the videos are forwarded. We intervened quickly and marked the videos as a virus so they were quickly destroyed. The cadet who sent the email was punished with a “gross error in judgment” cadet report and six months of punishment. But the end result was two lives shattered and two alumni who would leave the Army as fast as they could and never attend a class reunion.
- A cadet was three weeks from graduation and had been placing cameras in inappropriate places and capturing explicit images of one of the female sports teams, his female cadet friends, and his fiancé without their permission. He did not understand these images and movies were being backed up and immediately popped up in a nudity scan of the backup system. These are serious federal felonies. He had good lawyers and they attacked the chain of custody of the backup system, The attacks were without success. The cadet did not graduate. He lost his friends and fiancé as he filmed both. He went to the federal prison in Leavenworth.
If you are progressing through this journey sequentially, the next chapter is In Retrospect.