The theft of highly confidential data from the Office of Personnel Management was avoidable. OPM Director Katherine Archuleta is an apparatchik appointed by Obama because she is a loyal Democrat. That would be ok if she had the faintest grasp of technical and security issues. However, she rather clearly doesn’t. Compounding the problem of incompetence at the top is the huge lacking of funding for government entities like OPM. Budgets have been so decimated they have little to spend on securing up and modernizing existing computer systems.
I would not be even slightly surprised to learn OPM is running dinosaur COBOL systems that were originally written decades ago and are a convoluted spaghetti mess of patched-together code. Data comes in, the right answer goes out. No one quite knows why, or what happens when you change code that was written in the 1980’s now that the original programmers are long gone. Security? What’s that?
NTEU joins the lawsuits against OPM.
A second lawsuit has been filed against Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta for failing to protect federal employees’ personal information.
The National Treasury Employees Union alleges breaches of its members’ personnel records and potentially background investigations are unconstitutional.
The legal tactic differs from that of the largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, which last month asserted that employees suffered financial and emotional harm from violations of the 1974 Privacy Act.
OPM has been warned for years about their security deficiencies.
Federal watchdogs testified last month to Congress that OPM was put on notice of numerous security deficiencies dating back to 2007. The lapses include noncompliance with federal security rules, weak security management, and inadequate controls for all databases.
From the comments:
When my personal information is sold, my accounts drained and my credit ruined, what will the government say? oh so sad to be you.
I am being spied on daily by the alphabet agencies, yet they can’t keep my private information protected? – and remember if you cited any of your loved ones as beneficiaries on documents you had to give their social. So their information has been compromised too!