Office of Personnel Management Says Hackers Got Data of Millions of Individuals

Sure, you could in theory have a highly distributed system with multiple keys, but then you can't use it day to day for monitoring communications, which is the whole purpose of the backdoor.

The government may be able to keep the nuclear codes safe in such a fashion, but it wouldn't if ten different government agencies wanted to use them on a daily basis.

Backdoors make the situation worse, not better. We'll still have ISIS, we'll be even less secure, and we'll have lost whatever is left of our right to privacy.

Pretty much a lose-lose for everyone involved (except maybe ISIS).

The answer to "But, ISIS!" is not backdoors, it's foreign policy.

The fact that a BLM officer lost his firearm doesn't instantly mean that all the cruise missiles are next, but yes, the fact that the USG is unable to maintain sensitive records of twenty million cleared personnel does say something about their ability to keep secret information safe.

The closest thing to the proposed encryption backdoor is the clipper chip proposal of the 90s, and that did have severe vulnerabilities that the authors completely overlooked.

And I'd recommend you watch John Oliver's segment about nuclear launch codes to recalibrate your trust in those officials. We've come scarily close to Armageddon multiple times over the last few decades, which was prevented only by sheer dumb luck. Just because it's the scariest thing known to man doesn't mean the people responsible for it aren't incompetent.

http://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch-code-at-u...

No thanks.

This is precisely how I feel about this kind of thing.

To my mind, the NSA should be working to make the security technologies used by American individuals, American companies, and the American government as strong and as free of vulnerabilities as possible. The necessary degree of transparency would, of course, mean any such improvements would be available to anyone in other countries, but I think that situation is far superior to our current climate where we suspect (and not as wild conspiracy theory) that our vulnerabilities were as likely created by the NSA as not.

Many American individuals—and presumably companies—consider the NSA an adversary simply because these individuals value their privacy and the NSA has shown only hostility toward Americans concerning their privacy. In some alternate universe, my own opinion of the NSA could have been positive had they been an agency focused on decreasing the risk of individuals' privacy being compromised.

At the very least, that they are not (apparently) presently sufficiently charged with assisting other branches of the government maintain security is a misallocation of talent.

Is that really their job? It seems there might be a dozen other agencies responsible, ones less interested in foreign computer networks. Is that DISA's bailiwick? Perhaps NIST? Homeland Security? et cetera

Defense against "cyber attack" isn't even NSA's job, and where NSA participates in such endeavors that's on .mil, not .gov

DHS does have responsibility for cyber security on .gov however. But what is DHS supposed to do if OPM decides to throw open the keys to the kingdom to any random "authenticated" contractor handling background checks?

P.S. NSA might somehow have caught this despite everything I mentioned if they were engaged in better "monitoring operations" on other government networks and international communications relays... is that really what you want?

What I'd like to know is how this information failed to warrant even the level of protection mandated for medical records - according to at least one major news source, the data wasn't even encrypted. The standard criteria in the US for "top secret" classification is described as material having the potential to cause "exceptionally grave damage" to the national security of the nation. A database of information pertaining to a process designed to collect all information potentially usable for coercion (blackmail, social ties, etc) of all the individuals in the most sensitive positions of the government, should have been classified and protected at the Top Secret level.

Frankly, the outrage I've seen so far is not nearly enough for the scale of the irresponsibility here. I firmly believe the director and CIO of the OPM should not only be removed from office, they should be subject to criminal charges for mishandling information that clearly _should_ have been classified.

The Navy is happy to fire commanding officers for calling out sailors who show up late for physical training because it's embarrassing to the sailor, and yet it seems like we can't get anything close to that kind of accountability elsewhere.

It's not so much that Archuleta 'let this happen' (since I guarantee they would be hacked anyways), but the defensive efforts prior to this happening were even worse than you'd expect for government, and the response efforts since have almost been worse!