This Is The Future You Chose

June 17, 2015 – 7:20 pm

We’ve been hearing a lot, lately, about Rachel Dolezal, Bruce Jenner, and other stories of historic magnitude, but awfully little about China’s “hack” of the Office of Personnel Management’s records — which, in this Information Age, is roughly on a par with Pearl Harbor.

Why put “hack” in scarequotes? Because — wait for it — we gave root access to programmers in China.

More here.

Posted by Malcolm on at 7:20 pm, filed under Politics, Technology. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

5 Comments

  1. JK says

    http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/04/navy-issues-tablets/

    ___

    http://20committee.com/2015/06/13/opm-hack-is-serious-breach-of-worker-trust/

    Posted June 17, 2015 at 8:18 pm | Permalink
  2. JK says

    The last link I’m going to be placing on this thread as I recall, is already “somewhere in the archives” Malcolm.

    This most recent problem is going to be rearing its ugly head again and again until the subject of the second and final link addresses its Frankenstein.

    In February 2005, DHS and the Office of Personnel Management issued rules relating to employee pay and discipline for a new personnel system named MaxHR. The Washington Post said that the rules would allow DHS “to override any provision in a union contract by issuing a department-wide directive” and would make it “difficult, if not impossible, for unions to negotiate over arrangements for staffing, deployments, technology and other workplace matters.”

    In August 2005, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer blocked the plan on the grounds that it did not ensure collective-bargaining rights for DHS employees.

    A federal appeals court ruled against DHS in 2006; pending a final resolution to the litigation, Congress’s fiscal year 2008 appropriations bill for DHS provided no funding for the proposed new personnel system. DHS announced in early 2007 that it was retooling its pay and performance system and retiring the name “MaxHR”.

    In a February 2008 court filing, DHS said that it would no longer pursue the new rules, and that it would abide by the existing civil service labor-management procedures. A federal court issued an order closing the case.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security

    _______

    The Congress Critters can yell all they want about “Somebody Must Get To The Bottom of This” but they (the Congress Critters) only think about the next election.

    http://warontherocks.com/2014/09/congress-can-fix-dhs-but-needs-to-fix-itself-first/

    Posted June 17, 2015 at 10:49 pm | Permalink
  3. TheBigHenry says

    “Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment testified that encryption would ‘not have helped in this case’ because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked – likely through social engineering .”

    “Social engineering” is political-BS-speak for “somebody f*cked up”. My guess is that Katherine Archuleta director, Office of Personnel Management, is the “wise Latina” who blew it. She should be a lock for the next available seat at the Supremes.

    Posted June 18, 2015 at 12:37 pm | Permalink
  4. Troy says

    Collective bargaining rights trumps national security. God I despise judges and public unions.

    Posted June 19, 2015 at 1:31 pm | Permalink
  5. JK says

    Just to show Malcolm that Duffleblog link I placed wasn’t far off the mark.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-navy-pays-out-millions-to-microsoft-to-keep-running-windows-xp

    Posted June 23, 2015 at 1:37 pm | Permalink

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