Hacks, Breaches, and Government Ineptness

While the headlines over the past week have been swamped with coverage over the candidates bidding for the 2016 presidential election and a “trans-racial” NAACP leader lying about her race, critically important issues that are detrimental to our national security have gone virtually unnoticed. For instance, on Friday we learned that as many as 14 million current and former civilian U.S. government employees had their information compromised in an unprecedented attack by Chinese hackers. In a late Friday news dump, the Associated Press announced that the hackers stole, “Social Security numbers, military records and veterans’ status information, addresses, birth dates, job and pay histories; health insurance, life insurance and pension information; and age, gender and race data.” This was the second hack by China in one week. The first hack occurred last Monday as it was disclosed by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that up to 4 million federal employees, including those who had applied for security clearances with the federal government, had their information stolen. On Friday, the AP revealed a second, even deeper intrusion into OPM servers. This hack included personal and security data on millions of past and present Pentagon employees, including intelligence and military personnel. According to Joel Brenner, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official, the information obtained via these two hacks constitutes a disaster for Washington’s counterintelligence operatives as it “tells the Chinese the identities of almost everybody who has a United States security clearance.”...more