[nknighthb]

You can consider whatever you want to be gross negligence. The legal system, on the other hand, would look to things like the exact circumstances, the reasons things were done as they were, and whether and to what degree the relevant actions deviated from relevant rules, regulations, and standard practices in similar situations.

And unless you have all of that information, you can't possibly make that judgement.

[wavefunction]

Like I said, it's just my opinion dude, so don't get all worked up. And if you're not getting worked up, my apologies, but that's how your replies seem to me.

For instance, it seems like common sense or widely accepted practice that sensitive materials should be stored on machines that should be air-gapped, and common knowledge informs legal decisions about what is gross negligence or not.

For instance:

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Gross+negligen...

"If one has borrowed or contracted to take care of another's property, then gross negligence is the failure to actively take the care one would of his/her own property."

Obviously this is open to interpretation and maybe the contractors responsible leave their own private affairs open willy-nilly to the world, but I would suppose they shouldn't have security clearance then...

[nknighthb]

How are you proposing that tens of thousands of people around the globe working together on multi-billion-dollar projects perform their jobs effectively if all the information is stored on isolated machines?

[wavefunction]

Geographic isolation, first, so no more "globe-spanning" workforce on trillion-dollar projects. Then they can only work on a dedicated internal network on machines they leave in the office, which media-isolation limited to heavily controlled workstations so someone can't copy things over USB or burn it to disk or upload it via a VPN tunnel.

That seems fair, considering the magnitude of the expenditures and the nature of the work.

[nknighthb]

So, at this point, are you saying unspecified Lockheed employees should be brought up on criminal charges for doing their work in a manner approved and even directed by the US government?

Or do you just not have any idea how government contracting works?

Edit: Perhaps I should be more clear. There are multiple companies working on these projects. Some of them are in multiple countries. The US government has awarded contracts for various parts of the F-35 project to these various companies and told them to work together. The government knows this will involve communicating between multiple sites around the world.

Even within the US, the government knows different companies are in different states, and does not expect the entire workforce of every company to relocate to one place. These contracts are awarded to geographically diverse companies for political reasons, which you might not like, but that's how it is.

You can't charge people with a crime for executing on a government contract in exactly the manner they are supposed to.