BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Well, seems that national security had hit the highest heights:

FLIGHT plans for a US presidential visit and other top-secret information have mistakenly appeared on a small British town's tourism website.

E-mails containing the material were meant to go to the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, via its website, the BBC reports.

But instead they went to a town tourism website which had a similar address.

The USAF said it had sent out an e-mail advising contacts, family and friends of airmen based at the site to use the correct address.

Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall, set up the website "mildenhall.com" in the late 1990s to promote the town.

But by 2001 he was starting to get hundreds of e-mails meant for people at the airbase.

Flight plans

The e-mails included jokes, spam, personal information and military information.

He said he contacted the base a number of times, but officials told him not to worry about it.

But on one occasion, he said, when he told an official at the base about receiving information about presidential flight plans, the official "went nuts".

"That kind of information is not meant to be passed out to Joe Public," Mr Sinnott said.

He added that another e-mail he received was about US "military procedures and tactics".

"It had the notice 'Destroy by any means to prevent capture'," he said.

Mr Sinnott has now decided to take his website down to avoid getting these messages.

A spokesman for the USAF said: "In 2004, The 100 Communication Squadron advised Mr Sinnott to block unrecognizable addresses from his domain and have an auto-reply sent reminding people of the official Mildenhall domain."