A tourist information website promoting a small Suffolk town has had to shut down after it received a barrage of thousands of classified US military emails. |  | USAF F16s from Mildenhall. Thousands of sensitive emails have been misdirected to a tourist website
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Sensitive information including future flight paths for US Presidential aircraft Air Force One, military strategy and passwords swamped Gary Sinnott's email inbox after he established www.mildenhall.com, a site promoting the tiny town of Mildenhall where he lives, the Anglia Press Agency reports. As well as Mr Sinnott and his neighbours, Mildenhall is home to a huge US Air Force base and its 2,500 servicemen and women, and the similarity in domain names has led to thousands of misdirected emails from Air Force personnel. Any mail sent to addresses ending @mildenhall.com would have ended up in Mr Sinnott's mailbox.
Now military bosses have blocked all military email to the address, and persuaded him to close down his site to end the confusion. He is giving up ownership of the address next month.
Mr Sinnott said: "You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that I have been receiving - I wonder if they ever had any security training. When I told the Americans they went mental.
"I got mis-sent e-mails right from the start in 2000 but even after I warned the base they just kept on coming. At one stage I was getting thousands of spam messages a week. "I was getting jokes and videos and some of the material was not very nice - people were sending stuff without checking the address. "But then I began to receive military communications from all over the world - a lot containing very sensitive information." Agents from the USAF Office of Special Investigations have visited Mr Sinnott to ask him to delete any classified material he may have received, but concerns have been raised that resourceful terrorists could use similar methods to fool the US military into revealing state secrets. The senior British officer at Mildenhall air force base sympathised with Mr Sinnott, but said that the problem was hard to solve. Sqdn Leader Richard Fryer said in a letter: "Unfortunately there is no mechanism to forcibly prevent individuals, when in their private capacity, from sending e-mails to a particular address. "We take the matter seriously but regret that there is little we can reasonably do." Mr Sinnott said: "I have tried telling people they have got the wrong address. But some have reacted badly and one person who got really annoyed gave my address to people who send out spam - I was getting up to 7,500 a week from one source alone." |