Our CIA and DEA agents exposed
As you may have read, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was hacked a year ago and has recently admitted to having lost an ever increasing number of personnel records, now almost twenty-two million and counting. That’s people who applied for U.S. government jobs as long ago as ~2000.
The government and media says that it’s the Chinese. I suspect that the dart landed on the “blame the Chinese” spot on the dartboard as the key reason for blaming them this time.
Who knows when they’ll tell the whole truth about the massive bungling as they didn’t bother to encrypt this data. It took an outside company demonstrating security software, CyFir, to discover the hack. The reveal was initially about four million and steadily increasing, five fold at this time.
The delay in telling the truth is a business and government tactic to lie about hacking, (remember Target) by claiming a small number and then systematically increasing the count over a few weeks or months. Why?
The television news (entertainment) media (better known for pitching drug commercials to addict all Americans from cradle to grave) makes the government hacking big news for a day or so. It then loses interest preferring to sensationalize the newest disaster. That’s why it’s called the “news,” and not the “old news.”
Old new is no news.
What has been missed by the media is that every government employee and contractor from President Obama and down (or up as the Republicans say) have almost certainly had their records stolen.
Those records include all of the personal information, fingerprints, photographs, home addresses, family members and friends, agencies applied to, job descriptions and almost anything else imaginable especially for these most sensitive jobs.
That information is gone and will be sold to interested parties and used by governments who hate our government because of our insane foreign policy.
If you think about it, every sensitive job starts with a job application. They are all employees first, before they get those sensitive jobs. Those jobs include employees of the most sensitive – CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, and all of the other alphabet soup agencies that we know little about.
It means that foreign governments will have little trouble finding our spies and agents, as they’ll have all of the information needed to spot them. Family members will also be at kidnap risk and worse for revenge and blackmail seeking enemies.
I’m also sure that the drug cartels in Latin America will be delighted to identify our undercover DEA agents. They’ll have a bidding war to get those records. It’s a disaster, and completely ignored by the media.
The Taliban won’t care about the DEA as it’s well known that Afghan farmers (taxed by the Taliban) produce almost all of the opium based products. refined into Schedule One drugs. Our government wasn’t bothered to eradicate them while we were in that fruitless war and it’s too late now.
This lost records story will become bigger. Much bigger. It’s all because of OPM government employees and its IT department laziness.
Editor’s note, October 2nd, 2015
The BBC just reported that the CIA has withdrawn its agents from China because of the OPM hack. I wrote in July that these and many more agencies are almost all compromised. If the Chinese really did the hacking, they’ll be sure to share them with our enemies as it will buy political points. I wonder when the CIA will withdraw our agents from Russia, and the DEA from Latin America?
The Chinese (and others) will be watching very carefully to see who replaces them. They will either very young or older, hopefully not subject being identified through the theft of the fifteen years of OPM data.
That twentieth century data (or so it’s claimed) was not compromised?
