Hacks
The Office of Personnel Management is the human relations/personnel department of the Federal government. Katherine Archuleta, who has been the director of the OPM since 2013, has resigned effective today. She announced last month that the department’s computer system had been hacked and the personnel records of 4.2 million current and former federal workers have been compromised. Yesterday she announced that the records of 21.5 million people who had applied for government background checks since 2000 were probably also taken.
Of course, Congresscritters immediately started demanding her resignation. What no one seems interested in discussing is the reality that the only reason we know about the hack is because Ms Archuleta has been upgrading the software since she took over the department, and the upgraded software discovered the break-in.
No good deed goes unpunished in politics.
10 comments
There was no hack.
I repeat, there was no hack. What there was, was people authorized to access the systems who themselves should have never passed a background check. There were Chinese nationals who had full root access to the network. There was a contractor in Argentina who had full root access to the network. Because they were contractors.
They didn’t get hacked by someone outside their network. They got looted by people they’d given the keys to. People who should have never had keys. It’s as if I went out and found a criminal getting out of jail on burglary charges, and gave him my house key.
This reminds me of Edward Snowden more than anything. Except in this case, there were multiple Edward Snowdens, contract sysadmins who had way too much access to the network, and most of them worked for foreign governments.
a Cyber-security specialist on Alex Wagner’s show claimed these leaks were the result of dubya’s privatization.
I don’t know why anyone would trust a private firm to act in the interests of the people instead of for themselves. It flies in the face of Randian philosophy.
Just wait and see what happens when a marketing firms gains access to NSA files.
OUTSOURCING — Making Government more Efficient since 1980!
But … but … but that is unpossible, Badtux because James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has told media talking heads that it was the evil Chi-Coms.
Yeah, when you give root access to contractors you have no security, especially when you have out-sourced background checks to the low bidder.
The big thing about government employees is that when they don’t do their jobs they can not only lose their jobs, they can go to prison.
As it stands now the only one who has been punished is the person who pushed to make the system more secure, which is pretty much SOP in politics – shoot the messenger.
what pj said – and I do my best to remind people of this all the time.
I’m still waiting for all of the savings that comes from ‘privatization’ of public purposes. 😈
😈 is right!
it took me a while to get my ear calibrated, but if you listen closely enough, you canl hear that “savings increase” is really “savings accounts of the 0.01% will increase.”
That’s the group that gets the contracts and the tax cuts.
Last year, Philadelphia schools were allocated $0 for textbooks. Because Pennsylvania needed to give more tax cuts to the rich.
Gotta have priorities, y’know. What’s more important, the future of our country, or tax cuts for the rich? Yeesh!
Well, the rich are required to support yacht builders, limo companies, personal trainers [shoppers, assistants, chefs, et al.], so they are essential to the country, unlike teachers, firemen, cops, and other low-lifes who actually do something besides move money around for a living.