General Wesley Clark on CNBC's Closing Bell

July 27, 2007
transcript by Melange

Maria Bartiromo: Welcome back. Well he is a distinguished military commander and former presidential candidate. Now General Wesley Clark is warning the government about sensitive materials turning up on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. General Wesley Clark joins me now with more on this problem. General, nice to have you with us. How have you been?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you Maria. Good, good to see you.

Maria Bartiromo: Tell me about…tell me a little about the security and the peer-to-peer file sharing networks. You've been really on the forefront to tighten security there. What have you found?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well basically it's possible now through at least one company, a company I'm affiliated with on the advisory board, to see across the entire peer-to-peer space and see what searches are out there. And what we've found is there's a lot of sensitive corporate information, personal information and government information that is inadvertently exposed to hostile searches in the peer-to-peer space. In other words, if you download a file sharing program, let's say Limewire – there's perhaps say 200 of these programs that will let you share videos or music, most of them on the condition that you can take it from someone else's computer but you have to open up your files. Well, it shows your whole hard drive in most cases and so inadvertently your hard drive becomes a server and everything that's on it is exposed to being revealed in searches. We watch the searches and there are actually people out there trolling the peer-to-peer space for sensitive corporate information, bank account numbers, social security numbers and we think classified information as well.