There are three aspects to this.
1. If you are a higher-range VIP with the State Department or CIA....doing anything related to China....you will eventually be targeted if you are inflexible in talks. They will sell your data to some kid in Vegas who will get you deep into ID-theft issues and you lose your clearance over this. I would expect a minimum of a two-dozen people a year to start discovering their career choice is ended.
2. For all these years...NO one wanted to fix ID theft. Face it....no one from the banking sector wants it fixed. You should ask why. No Senator cares....ask them why. Now? I think someone is going to wake up and demand ID-theft solutions asap.
3. Over the past decade....a lot of us who had clearances and did the stupid five-year updates and filled out the forms....continually asked how they protected the data we gave them. We got stupid answers. I remember how the dimwit answered my question in 2009....”we have a firewall”. Personally, I think we should now protect our own secrets better than we protect the government’s secrets. Give them as little as possible.
4. ??? Are the exempt ones even in this data breach ? Lawmakers may be ignoring this cause they are ‘exempt’ from risk.
The CIA does not use OPM. They do not trust any other agency with their personnel records.
You can protect the President and senior officials, but if the people who provide them with data and see to it that their orders get communicated, suddenly all decide they have to go into hiding, leaving empty offices, how well will things function?
Yep the updates were a joke.
The good news is that I received an E-mail yesterday from OPM offering me one and half years of FREE credit protection!
For all I know it was the Chi-Coms making the offer.
A minor functionary has more control over your life than almost any business (Google, Facebook and a few others excepted).
But if they are the fifth estate, they are now also turning against the state. When their personal information and identities are not even safeguarded by basic precautions like encryption, not even afforded the protection of the TPP treaties, they know the regime doesn’t value them the way they thought they should be.
Its the usual continuous incompetency of the govt. Disgusting. Incompetent and then they patronize you to make it worse. Adding injury to injury!
ID theft is a sympton of technology. I grew up when the phone company would throw two books, white and yellow pages, on your doorstep for free full of names, addresses and phone numbers.
To steal that way back then would take too much investment and time to be profitable. But some did like stealing from your mailbox looking for checks they could forge, etc.
The thing that gets me is that OPM and the government spend billions on IT and my bank can protect my cards with them better.