U.S. government incompetence seems to grow by the month, and now we know it’s becoming a threat to national, and even individual American, security. The Obama Administration announced last week that Chinese hackers made off this year with personnel files that may have included those of all 2.1 million federal employees, plus former employees going back to the 1980s.
This is no routine hack. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) lost background-check data to the Chinese nine months before this breach and still hadn’t locked the cyber front door. OPM’s inspector general issued a damning report last November that parts of its network should be shut down because they were riddled with weaknesses that “could potentially have national security implications.” You can’t ring the alarm much louder than that, but the failure to take basic precautions continued.
In other words this isn’t a James Bond movie. It’s a Dilbert cartoon. Despite years of warnings, and after the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden debacles, the federal bureaucracy can’t protect its most basic data from hackers. Private companies like Target are pilloried, not least by politicians, for their data leaks. But the feds have $4 trillion to spend each year plus access to the most advanced encryption systems. Will anyone in government take responsibility for this fiasco?
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