They probably don’t realize these are not all mustache-twirling villains, in fact some might be hard-working civil servants.
Not to mention, they’ve made the mistake of trusting VICE, an extremely risky activity I’ve commented on before.
What does villainy have to do with anything? The only way to really know whether or not government employees might be hard-working civil servants is through transparency and oversight. The unfortunate aspect of this is that we need to force transparency and disclosure from a runaway system of people who feel entitled to keep government secret.
Yea, releasing the Social Security number of clerks and typists does not bring transparency to government.
I’m torn. On the one side most of the data trove consists mostly of low-level clerks, not better or worse of than other employees. But on the other hand The System uses often the nothing to hide argument, inherently bogus for every member of a society.
Most of the victims of this dump are innocent and deserve privacy, but this is also true for the by-catch of mass surveillance and private individuals affected by criminal hacks.
By-catch. That’s almost as good as collateral damage. Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, eh?
My information was among the millions in the OPM hack last year. I suppose I deserve it; I worked for The Man for a year or so. Fortunately, it hasn’t ended up on Pastebin yet, or wherever l33t hax0rz swap their warez. Your tax dollars bought me a year of identity monitoring, and I don’t believe anybody was ever arrested. I guess that makes me by-catch.
Every American is by-catch of a sort, whether we worked for the Man or not. I’d say you shouldn’t take it so personally, except that we should all take it personally. This is what happens when the state screws people over: It gets bad for everyone. When the government lacks accountability, normal means of protest are inevitably replaced by ones that have a more substantial impact. Right? Wrong? It kind of ends up not mattering because it becomes inevitable. An unaccountable government is also a government with crappy OpSec because they don’t have to answer to anyone. You got screwed over? Too bad, from the perspective of both parties.
ETA: Which is not to say “too bad” from the perspective of this party.
ETAA: Like seriously, that sucks man.
It’s been about a decade since I’ve been part of a dump, mostly (entirely?) due to luck. The one I was a part of was the rootkit.com fiasco. A Russian infosec team notified me personally out of the blue. They were hoopy froods.
Oh, and I’ve seen this dump. It isn’t good. Not earth ending, but if there isn’t a bunch of spear phishing related to it by years end I’ll eat my hat.
This is the explanation my governments gives me. The data preservation (formerly killed by both European and national courts) is enacted again, and the data trove/by-catch makes my life more secure. Or similar.
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