That would be a great argument, if eliminating removable thumbdrives and media would in any way impede internal communications. No business communication is don

That would be a great argument, if eliminating removable thumbdrives and media would in any way impede internal communications. No business communication is done on removable media in these places. That would never be a good idea for a host of reasons (remember the lost laptop with personal info on it? other than leaking there are lots of reasons this is a bad idea) This ban prevents the people who work in the government offices from bringing in music CDs and pictures on a thumb drive. Recall Pfc Manning was pretending to play Lady Gaga on a CD when he was burning all this stuff onto disk. That's it. There is no other reason to use removable stuff at work except to leak or bring in files like that. I'm actually shocked this specific ban took so long. The contractor I work for banned CDs (burned or not) after the Sony rootkit incident, flash or floppy drives have been banned forever.