I’ve really got no idea. None at all.

On the one hand, evaluating things from a traditional espionage angle, the OPM loss was a loss of truly epic proportions, a personnel security Pearl Harbor. You really can’t trust anything in that vast database at this point, and you see nothing at all about that fact being dealt with publicly. I’m not even sure what you could do, short of booting everyone currently in the system and starting over with new people, which would be… Problematic, to say the least.

Not only do you need to worry about corruption in the data, you have to concern yourself with what could be done with it. If you’ve ever seen an SF-86, and the depth of background information in one, plus all the investigative stuff that gets triggered and then kept linked to the same files? Literally everything about millions non-affiliated people are linked in there, as well–My nieces and nephews, for example. My parents, in-laws, brothers, sisters… You name it; going back a couple of generations for those of us who had deeper background checks because of foreign connections or whatever. Access to that database was literally a roadmap to our personnel security system, and when you add into the fact that it can no longer be trusted, at all, in any way? People could have had derogatory information inserted, positive information deleted, and all sorts of false identities could have been created and inserted. Passive access to it was damaging enough, but everything I’ve seen points to the penetration having included such insertions and deletions.

So, basically, nothing can be trusted.

The cavalier way they dealt with the security loss is maddening. I’m still getting letters about it.

Of course, this isn’t the first or the last time it happened, either–I just got a letter warning me that all of my personal information had been compromised by some freakin’ military charity that I never once used or even really was aware existed. Who the hell is warehousing and then keeping all this information laying around, without real security? Why aren’t people being held accountable for any of it?

As to consequence for “average America”? No idea. None. All I can say is that everyone you rely on for national security is compromised, at this point. You can’t trust a damn one of us, because you just don’t know what is lurking in the background. Dude has a clearance; you go to hire him for classified work, only to find out that he’s been subject to Chinese blackmail. The follow-on effects from this are incalculable, to be honest–Lots of the reason why people like hiring military veterans is because of the fact they’ve been vetted and have a track record. But, what if you can’t trust what’s in the system? The damage, long-term, is mind-numbing. Who is going to hire anyone for anything that’s subject to blackmail over something in their background, whose family and friends are in a database that exposes them to extortion? Guess what, folks? Now, even an honorable military career and discharge certificate mean that you’re subject to a loss of trust due to these issues. The effect is insidious.

None of this crap should have been collected up and digitized, and once that was done, it should never have been left as insecure as it was. This was an own-goal of epic proportion, and there’s no way of knowing all the long-term ramifications of it all. You’re not going to know until American warships are being sunk due to things like the Walker ring or other intelligence failures.

What you can do about it all? No idea. None at all. Point and laugh at the hubristic nature of it all, and hope against hope, going forward, that we can compensate for all of this? Hum a few bars, fake it, and just keep hoping? That’s about all I can really say. The full ramifications of all this aren’t really knowable, and about all I can say is that the handwriting is on the wall with all the stuff making the news about the Chinese “making” all our operatives and so forth internationally, and not even bothering to hide it. I would wager that most of our losses in this realm are traceable right back to the OPM breach, along with the Obama-era rolling up of our networks in China.

Venal incompetence is what it was, unrecognized and unpunished. You really cannot overstate the potential harm of all this, going forward.

Thank you for your valuable insight. The extent of the SF-86 breach is indeed huge. As a suburban husband and father outside who works outside of government, please tell me what “we are essentially doomed as a nation” means to me and what I should do to prepare. Thank you again.

He should never have been allowed to move any storage media – including a cellphone, mp3 player, or smart watch – into or out of the security DMZ.

And simple quota and auditing tools, built right in to every major OS and network, should have set off alarms when someone started accessing gigabytes of data.

That’s just the big things.

Even for .gov levels of dumbassery, it’s simply too many security fails to be credible.

Also note that while the Fed and media claimed to be gobsmacked by the “revelations”, not all of them were verifiable, and almost all of the rest were either public knowledge or widely assumed as fact by IT security types for decades. Some of the Snowden stuff was discussed in the usenet comp.risks forum back in the early 1990s… well, I guess being that long ago, it might as well all be new again.

Back in the ’60s the Soviets planted Golitsyn on us, and drove the CIA half-mad on mole hunts after that. I’m thinking we returned the favor with Snowden.

Oh, I’m pretty sure that society could withstand my loss, and might even gain from it–At least, from the perspective of most.

Curmudgeons are a dime-a-dozen; all you have to do is wait for those who can’t avoid looking around them with clear vision to age and experience enough, and you’ve got plenty more where I came from.

Watch your blood pressure. We can’t afford to lose you!

You are right that the US is heading straight for a cliff. We have not been watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots. We have mostly not even been paying attention as the country was stolen from beneath our feet.

One little incident in the Soetero years really caught my attention. United Airlines used to have a number of non-stop flights from the US to the Middle East. Apparently, a big slice of the business was carrying US military personnel and freight. Seems fair enough, US taxpayers paying for flights on a US airline.

Then Barry’s boys awarded the contract to Jet Blue instead of United. But hang on! Jet Blue does not fly to the Middle East. No, all Jet Blue had was a code share arrangement with Dubai’s Emirates Airlines. So the military traffic went on to Emirates and United withdrew from the market.

No disrespect to Dubai, from whom we could learn many lessons. They don’t have an equivalent of the IRS, but do have a Minister of Happiness (because a happy workforce is a productive workforce). But there is no need for the US taxpayer to subsidize Dubai’s airline.

Nobody in the Swamp cared. They get their (our) lunch money stolen every day, and they don’t even notice. Sic transit Gloria!

You can research it for yourself, and I recommend that you do, in order that you’re not relying on my admittedly biased perspective.

As best I can tell, the deal was that the Obama administration put OPM under an unqualified hack whose sole distinction was having been the political director on the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. Katherine Archuleta had been warned about the issues, but did nothing. The exact details of what went on are rather opaque, in that they’re carefully talking around what really happened and who was responsible, but my read on things is that the system was likely penetrated a long time ago, and the blame may actually lie elsewhere.

The thing that absolutely enrages me is that as a Security Manager in the military, it was my job to oversee the safety and security of the whole process. Typically, you submitted the SF-86 on a floppy disc after the individual applying for the clearance input all their personal data. This was done on a classified machine, and the resultant disks had to be safeguarded. Had I lost one? Let alone several million individual records? My ass would be under Leavenworth until the sun went out. The asshole political hacks they put in charge of OPM did not one ‘effing day in jail, and there were even arguments against holding them accountable!

As a nation, the erosion of standards and accountability for things like this are far more indicative of the essential destruction of our society than anything else. Time was, someone like Archuleta would never have been put in a position of trust like that, but the Obama admin treated OPM like a reward for political work, akin to an ambassadorial job. We can see the results.

Things like this are why I’m more-or-less certain that we’re essentially doomed as a nation. The idiocy of putting some political hack like Archuleta in charge of something like OPM is just incredible, and what’s even more incredible is that nobody has paid attention to it outside the circle of those who know what the realities of intelligence work are, and because of that, nobody cares.

Reality is, that single event alone? It should have been treated like a digital Pearl Harbor, and it should have led to the immediate prosecution and ostracization of all responsible parties. None of the assholes in the Obama administration who were even on the periphery of that sequence of decision and dereliction of duty should be allowed positions of trust and responsibility, and the Congressional oversight that should have taken place and yet didn’t…?

Frankly, just mentioning this crap to me raises my blood pressure dangerously. I can’t over-emphasize what a huge, huge “thing” this was, and nobody seems to really recognize it or give a flying fuck.

How did the OPM contract end up being awarded to a Chinese company anyway? OK. Nancy Pelosi and a number of other big Democrats are knowingly or unwittingly on China’s payroll — but US internal security must have been fairly incompetent in the first place to have allowed that to happen.

All we can hope is the the data entry process to OPM was about as efficient as the average Department of Motor Vehicles.