Office of Personnel Management Director (OPM) Katherine Archuleta was unsure of how many employees and retirees’ information her agency oversees and might have been breached in testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Archuleta was asked by Chairman Jason
FireEye, a private sector cybersecurity firm, told media that they believe they have discovered who was behind the massive hack on the federal Office of Personnel Management in which millions of federal employees’s data was stolen.
The Boston Globe reports an astounding admission from Hillary Clinton during an interview with WMUR radio in Boston: the former Secretary of State was well aware that her department was under constant cyberattack, but she broke the rules, and possibly laws, to build a dangerously insecure email server for herself and top aides anyway.
That’s Big Government failure in a nutshell, isn’t it? It’s everyone’s fault, which means it’s no one’s fault. The bigger the federal government gets, the less anyone within it worries about the consequences of abuse or failure.
What if we’d known from Day One that the real number is more like 18 million current, former, and prospective federal employees, as CNN reported on Monday night? Just the other day, Administration flacks were whining that the 14 million worst-case number floated by some security analysts was exaggerated; now it looks like that was a lowball estimate. America has suffered an act of war, but this White House remains more interested in keeping it quiet than dealing with it.
Not only has the American human intelligence system been disastrously compromised around the world, but back here at home, the intel community is going to be playing defense for years to come, worried sick about how many government employees with security clearances might have been approached for recruitment or blackmail by China and its allies.
The bombshells just keep coming in the Office of Personnel Management’s hack, which is bidding to eclipse Obamacare’s launch as the most stunning example of Big Government incompetence in the Information Age. The latest bad news is that Chinese hackers had a full year to rummage around inside the OPM’s security clearance system–plenty of time to take just about anything they wanted.
The government knew security was wide open for years, and did nothing. It’s a wonder they weren’t hacked before now. There will be no “accountability” for any of this. The Obama Administration doesn’t like to concede any sort of error by collecting scalps from inept high-level employees, and it worries a great deal about what some of them might say in whistleblower interviews or tell-all books.
House and Senate staffers were previously told by OPM that only those with executive branch experience were at risk from the hack. Not until today’s House Oversight Committee hearings did the OPM director officially acknowledge that workers from all three branches of government were affected by the data breach.
No one is ever held responsible for failure in government any more; even the most breathtaking incompetence and abuse lead to zero terminations or punishment. Congress is beginning to grumble about hearings and subpoenas, but even those tend to be ignored and subverted in the Obama era.
Like the federal employees who have complained of being left to twist in the wind for months until the breach was acknowledged – and then forced to sit through days of stonewalling while officials revised their stories about how severe the penetration was, and how many people were affected – Chaffetz does not seem impressed with the transparency or vigor of the Administration’s response.
