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Comment by angry_octet | Hacker News Reader

The obvious consequence of the hack of the Office of Personnel Management. All the details of all clearance holders, including the background investigation into their personal lives, finances, psych evaluations, etc.

Overall a bigger disaster than the Snowden leaks, but it was too embarassing to explain. No one got punished for letting it happen.

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I hate how this shit is even in computers at all, much less networked ones. Can we not just revert to using paper and folders and filing cabinets for stuff like this until hacking computers isn't so trivial?

Are you suggesting that one of the largest HR depts. in the world revert to paper & filing cabinets? Can you imagine the massive cost of that? The efficiency loss? It would be staggering.

Governmental record keeping of this sort is literally one of the first uses for computers.

100% less costly than the OPM breach.

There is no easy way to quantify this argument but let me suggest my opinion is that you are orders of magnitude wrong.

This shouldn't have been stored on an unclassified, publicly accessible computer. This is a prime example of how the aggregation of unclassified information can be used to derive classified information.

Example... oh, there's lots of people with TS clearances in this little town in the midwest. Maybe there's something to that. Let's check it out.

That's a sensible argument. Revert to filing cabinets isn't.

Apparently during ww2 the editors of a SF mag worked out something nuclear related was going on at los Alamos by looking at the cluster of subscriptions

I really do not think the efficiency loss will be large.

One centralized location that you can phone in with some smart authentication system, human workers for the rest of it. Getting cleared already takes a while (weeks or longer) so what's the huge problem with keeping the classified stuff actually safe?

At this point I don't feel especially confident that any of this stuff is going to stay secure given the prevalence of leakers and hacks. The choice is store on a computer and accept that it is going to be leaked at least occasionally or do not store it on a computer.

There were 21.5 million records stolen. If each file averages 5 mm in depth thats over 100 km of depth you need to have (you can do similar calculations for height/width).

If the OPM computers currently average 1 query per second (a number I'm pulling out of thin air, but one I'd guess was conservative). Even if you restrict that to 8X5 business hours access (an efficiency loss in itself) you have 2400 phone calls to answer and then traverse of the gigantic document store we created above.

I think this is one of those cases where people have very bad intuitive understanding of the scale of the data and what dealing with this kind of data looks like in a physical form.

That would interfere with the insider threat detection program! Big data! AI!

There was a story a while back that the Russians had reverted to typewriters and paper files.

Typewriters may not help them.

https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-fi...

I think we can assume they have heard of TEMPEST by now.

Aside from the obvious huge national security implications, this hack has been a pain in the ass on a personal level (the wife and I literally have a "days since someone tried to use our identity for fraudulent purposes" counter, it rarely gets above 30 days). We are both victims of the OPM hack.

Kind of ironic. My understanding is that personal information is collected (in part) to weed out people who would have histories that make them susceptible to blackmail.

People who deploy to war zones (for 12 months), or get sent on rotations to Boringtown, Iowa, get sad, divorced, gambling habits, alcoholism. The military pretends that everyone has good Christian marital relations; getting divorced can be a career killer, and getting caught cheating also. It's a mess.

It turns out that none of those problems is a very good indicator of insider threat. Hardly anyone gets blackmailed, all the big ones were volunteers. But the paranoia gripping the military at the moment will cause crazy damage. Kind of like a bear being bitten by fire ants, slashing itself all over.

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