If you’ve been following the progress of the Veterans’ ID Card legislation, it has passed both the House and Senate and has been sent to the President’s desk for his signature. That would be the good news.
On the not-so-good news front, we finally started to get some straight answers about the full scope of the hacking of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is just my own conjecture, but what was announced last month has surely been known for a while – hackers were able to break into the federal government’s personnel files and steal a lot of private information. Initially, OPM said four million records of federal employees, then that number climbed to fourteen million, then twenty-two. Perhaps it took them some time to discover just how much had been stolen, but it definitely took longer than it should have for them to fess up. Even when pressed by members of the House Intelligence Committee, information was withheld. This is beyond unacceptable.
To put in perspective just how bad this is, among other things, the hackers were able to access and remove the information that is compiled when the government performs background checks for security clearances. It appears that the hackers got every single file on every single person OPM has performed a background check on since 2000.
How bad could that be?
Well, picture a hundred page-form whose sole purpose is to tease out every bit of information from your past that might be used to embarrass you, blackmail you, bribe you, etc. It of course includes Social Security Numbers, drivers license numbers, date of birth, and so forth. But it also includes your relatives’ information and that of your closest friends. It includes a comprehensive list of everywhere you’ve ever lived, every time you’ve ever traveled, your passport number, visas, information about who you went with, who you talked to, etc. The files then move into the truly personal – a comprehensive accounting of any drug use – both illegal and pharmaceutical. What did you take? How often did you take it? With whom and where did you get it? Have you ever seen a psychiatrist? What for? Did they prescribe drugs? Do you still take them? What about your sexual history? Are you a homosexual? We need your financial history too. Have you ever overdrawn an account? Bounced a check? Fallen behind on a credit card? Are you broke right now? We need all of your mortgage information and we may come back for more details if we aren’t satisfied.
These forms are designed to tease out and identify anything at all that could be used by a foreign agent to pressure you into giving up our nation’s most carefully kept secrets. Usually, when a foreign government is trying to recruit somebody to spy for them, they have to spend inordinate amounts of time and money to identify a good prospective candidate. And once they’ve identified a prospect, it takes a while to gather all of the juicy details that make such recruitment a success. And because the people we trust to manage this process and (every other payroll and healthcare process for the federal government) has so egregiously messed up at maintaining basic security, somebody – probably the Chinese government – has the full files on everybody who has sought a security clearance through OPM since 2000. Federal officials have readily agreed that this information could be used for blackmail and counterintelligence for years to come. And as former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden explained, if we were in a position to do the same thing to our adversaries, we’d do it in a heartbeat. So in his words, “This isn’t shame on China. This is shame on us.”
The response from the director of OPM, Ms. Katherine Archuleta, was that she’s been working hard to update their computer systems (which were so outdated they were essentially ‘unprotectable’). Indeed she says that it was in the course of updating those systems that they were able to discover the theft. If only they’d had more money for new computers… I need to stop here or my head is going to explode. The Inspector General at OPM has been telling the agency to improve systems and best practices for years. Unfortunately, during many of those early warnings, Ms. Archuleta was serving as the National Political Director for President Obama’s 2012 campaign. Read into that what you will. The only positive thing I can tell you is that she has resigned and I think the President probably has the message now that he should put people in charge who have experience that is truly relevant to the job and not just relevant to him.
If anybody out there continues to believe that the government is that answer to all of our problems and that we should trust them to run the entire healthcare system for us to, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re living on a different planet than I am.
Congressman Rich Nugent represents The Villages in the U.S. House of Representatives.