Just in - great new opportunities for grads in security and intelligence positions.
When is the government gonna get it: “Back doors” for them are front doors for criminals and other malicious actors.
Of course, it’s getting kind of hard to tell the difference between the government and malicious actors, but that’s a different problem.
One thing that deserves clarification:
“… meaning that the attackers now have the personal details, identities, and blackmail info on everyone who works in sensitive areas for the US government.”
Many of the people who have clearance (Secret, Top Sectret, SCI, etc.) do not work in sensitive areas for the US government.
Contractors and agencies will arrange for employee clearance - at great expense - and often that employee doesn’t end up needing access to classified information.
This doesn’t make the information breach any less dangerous. Or make OPM, other agencies, and the various contractors charged with handling SF-86 and related info any less culpable. It just means that, fortunately, some of the would be targets are not quite as attractive as would-be hackers might think.
Just when you thought life in the DPRK couldn’t get any worse, the army makes you use one of those awful trackballs.
Why is the government exposing the personnel files to the public internet in the first place?
This could be a good thing. It would mean the end of the deep state, because anyone of those individuals trusted to do the governments secret work could be turned by a foreign agent. Now, if instead, most decisions were made in public, through established channels, the american public could weed out those actors who did not have America’s best interests at heart.
Malice. Incompetence. Choose one.
Aw, why can’t we have both?
That was yesterday. Today apparently, it’s all Snowden’s fault again.
According to anonymous Downing Street sources quoted by Murdoch’s Organ, The Sunday Times and then repeated endlessly and uncritically by every other news outlet in the world.
The fun facts today are that “millions of documents” were only “weakly encrypted”, and the encryption has now been “broken by the Russians and Chinese”, meaning that “operatives were put at risk” and “have had to be moved”. But “nobody was harmed”. And then a “Downing Street spokesman” said “we do not comment on leaks”.
Can you please send some more ironic quotation marks. I’m down to my last packet and in danger of running out.
OK. But then is it incompetent malice or malicious incompetence?
Why do we assume the government wants computer security? Maybe they think information wants to be free? Fling wide the gates! Let a thousand Snowdens bloom!
Apparently, the only thing keeping the government secure is the threat of lengthy prison terms. Snowden was a network admin,Manning was a low level analyst. Yet, for reasons the government declines to address, they were able to access and publish documents well outside their scope of employment. Clearly, it is inadvisable for a government to rely on deterrence as its primary line of defense.
If these documents were so sensitive, why weren’t they encrypted using the best available technology? Why wasn’t access to this database restricted to audited retrieval of individual records?
In short, why are the JSTOR records downloaded by Aaron Schwartz considerably more valuable than the extended background Investigations of blackmailable officials?
Oh that’s true. One bureaucrat might be incompetent (security engineer), and another bureaucrat (prosecutor), seeking to “correct” the other’s mistake, but not having the relevant authority or expertise, to do so directly, exercises his legal powers to address the matter (enhanced penalties for computer intrusion) which creates more problems, as spies are not deterred by legal niceties.
Great work, NSA!
Again , both.
That’s how they command their missiles.
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