| The OPM Breach Is a Catastrophe |
[16 Jun 2015|04:50pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/06/opm_hack_it_s_a_catastrophe_here_s_how_the_government_can_stop_the_next.html Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Or healthcare.gov? The federal government appears not to have. Last week it disclosed its discovery of a long-running and catastrophic breach of the Office of Personnel Management, one which resulted in the theft of 30 years’ worth of sensitive security-clearance, background-check, and personal data from at least 10 million current, past, and prospective federal employees and veterans. The government didn’t merely reveal shoddy IT security on the part of its agencies and contractors. It also revealed unforgivable negligence, because OPM and the government had known about these security problems for two years, already suffered multiple breaches, and done little to nothing about them. While it’s premature to blame China, which may have perpetrated the hack, it’s rather too late to point the finger at the government and its disastrous contracting system. With healthcare.gov it merely wasted huge amounts of money on garbage; with the OPM hack it compromised national security simply out of bureaucratic inertia and laziness. No one ever accused Edward Snowden of releasing personnel data en masse, as happened here. In terms of sheer volume, Snowden’s National Security Agency leak appears to have nothing on the OPM breach.
|
|