Does anyone in the Administration think the public should have been told their massive Energy Department – which is primarily concerned with interfering with energy production, not creating it – was hit by hackers over a thousand times, and successfully penetrated on 159 occasions? We needed USA Today to choke the news out of them with a FOIA request?
Did outgoing OPM Director Katherine Archuleta write her own resignation statement? Perhaps it’s better to ask: Did she even bother to read her own resignation statement? In any case, the last word on Archuleta’s tenure contains three embarrassing mistakes in the span of 10 sentences.
Yesterday’s revelations about the OPM hack being six times the size the government originally admitted to was accompanied by assurances from OPM director Katherine Archuleta that she would not resign. Today, she has broken that promise, stepping down from the post.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has revealed that hackers stole personal information on 25.7 million Americans. That information included Social Security numbers, financial histories, mental health records, and in over a million cases, fingerprints.
According to the revised government estimate, some 21.5 million Social Security numbers were stolen by the hackers. The Office of Personnel Management has announced it will pay for credit-monitoring and identity-theft services for all of them. If a significant number of the pilfered identities are used for criminal activity, the financial chaos unleashed will be devastating.
It would appear our government has learned the timeless truth that paper records, for all of their many disadvantages, cannot be hacked.
Just for a moment, let us indulge McLaughlin and Clift and suppose Hillary Clinton, contrary to all available evidence and testimony, really did set up a private server because she thought the State Department system she was required to use was dangerously vulnerable. What does that tell us about Big Government and its high priestess? The Democrats who saddled us with a gigantic burden of taxes, deficit spending, and regulations don’t trust the multi-trillion-dollar government they’ve built.
Will we now be told the “internal decision-making process” that led the Administration to misrepresent this debacle to the public was also nobody’s fault, mysterious orders emanating from nowhere, a tornado of dishonesty spinning away from a storm of incompetence?
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.
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.
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.