OPM Data Breach - Whitehouse Petition - Help Wanted

Thu Jun 18 02:57:27 UTC 2015

In message <CAOxD=zU=i2UMEdLixOOnqYW-3cF9RDFF4eN+KJG_sDcwDip_7A at mail.gmail.com>
Tyler Mills <tylermills at gmail.com> wrote:

>This is the government... you have to put on your bizarro-economics and
>bizarro-ethics glasses for the State to make sense.
>
>It does not operate like a market.  Failure results in people being
>shuffled around, and larger budgets. Failure justifies more control and
>power.  People get taken down for political reasons, not based on a lack of
>ability or lack of virtue.
>
>I would hope this measure succeeds and to see something meaningful come out
>of it, I just don't see it happening.

Thanks for your support.

And yes, I agree that most probably nothing will come of this, but it
is worth a try.

Consider this, if even just one out of every forty (1/40) of the affected
4+ million (now hopefully pissed off) federal workers signs this petition
then it will get past the 100,000 signature point and then the Whitehouse
will HAVE to respond to it.

Of course, even in that case, the WH might very well just put off their
response, you know, until that proverbial "cold day in hell"... just as
they have done, and continue to do, with the "Pardon Snowden" petition...
however as it that case, their mere lack of response... basically
ignoring their own rules which they made for themselves relating to
these petitions... would itself call more attention to their utter
failure, not only to prevent such breaches, but to even deal with
them in a sensible way afterwards.  (If this utterly unqualified
ethnic-checkbox woman had done this in the private sector, there's
no doubt that her ass would be out the door already.  As far as I have
been able to tell in my limited research, she never managed _anything_
in her life before being named as the head of OPM... not even a Denny's...
with the only possible exception being that she may have managed some
portion of the President's re-election campaign.)

Regards,
rfg

P.S.  I just learned that the story on this breach is even worse than
I already thought it was when I started the petition.  From ArsTechnica:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/encryption-would-not-have-helped-at-opm-says-dhs-official/

      ...
      A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to
      manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he
      found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in
      Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's
      Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in
      every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these
      databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I
      know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their
      privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information
      more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is
      'so what's new?'"

Un-bleeping believable!

There's nothing else that I can say about the quote above... at least
nothing else that I can say in polite company.