An enraging tale of government incompetence so severe that it beggars belief. Read this at the risk of your blood pressure spiking.

The inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management, which keeps the records and security clearance information for millions of current and retired federal employees, issued a report in November that essentially described the agency’s computer security system as a Chinese hacker’s dream.

But by the time the report was published, Chinese hackers had already cleaned out tens of thousands of files on sensitive security clearances, and were preparing for a much broader attack that ultimately obtained detailed personal information on at least four million current and former government employees. 

The agency did not possess an inventory of all the computer servers and devices with access to its networks, and did not require anyone gaining access to information from the outside to use the kind of basic authentication techniques that most Americans use for online banking. It did not regularly scan for vulnerabilities in the system, and found that 11 of the 47 computer systems that were supposed to be certified as safe for use last year were not “operating with a valid authorization.

The problems were so severe for two systems that hosted the databases used by the Federal Investigative Service, which is responsible for the background investigations for officials and contractors who are issued security clearances, that the inspector general argued for temporarily shutting them down because the security flaws “could potentially have national security implications.”

People need to go to jail for this.  Specifically, all those who had the responsibility to secure these records need to be frog marched in public into court, convicted, and then very publicly incarcerated, so others do not shirk their responsibility to safeguard this kind of information.

Government incompetence is of course famous, but this sort of information transfer to our enemies is akin to treasonous dereliction of duty, and should be treated accordingly.  Very infuriating.