Are Government Bureaucrats Capable Of Looking After Data They Collect About Us?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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If you’ve read any of the political posts on this blog you’ll already know the answer to the question posed in the title.

Staffed by stupid bureaucrats, the government isn’t capable of doing anything right, apart from trying to make all our lives miserable with needless and intrusive rules and regulations.

Proving the point, recently in the press there have been numerous stories about the personal data of an estimated 18 million current, former and prospective federal employees being the victim of what they call a ‘cyber breach’ at the Office of Personnel Management.

I say 18 million because that is what has currently been estimated by none other than FBI Director James Comey in a closed-door briefing to Senators recently. A far cry from the government’s lies that ‘only’ 4.2 million files were hacked. And that 18 million number is expected to grow, not get smaller – which I suppose makes the government’s lie even bigger.

The same hackers who accessed the Office of Personnel Management’s data are believed to have last year breached an OPM contractor, KeyPoint Government Solutions. When that OPM breach was discovered in April, investigators found that KeyPoint security credentials were used to breach the OPM system.

Some investigators believe that after that intrusion last year, OPM bureaucrats should have blocked all access from KeyPoint, and that doing so could have prevented more serious damage.

But the bureaucrats refused to do anything – probably waiting for a sub-committee to write a 2,000 page report first!

It is believed that the Chinese government is behind this latest ‘cyber breach’, which is considered the worst ever against the U.S. government – so far, that is. The Chinese hackers are believed to have built their own backdoor access to the OPM system, armed with high-level system administrator access codes.

Naturally since it happened under his watch and the buck stops with him, President Obama has ordered his administration to answer all accusations of incompetence by minimizing the severity of breach.

But the OPM’s internal auditors told a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee last week that key databases housing sensitive national security data, including applications for background checks, had not met federal security standards.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., responded thus, “I wish that you [the OPM] were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as are at keeping information out of the hands of Congress.”

If only!

So are the government bureaucrats capable of looking after the data they collect on us?

Of course they aren’t.

Looks as if all Snowden, the subject of Wednesday’s post (if you want to read it click here), is really guilty of, is doing the bureaucrat’s job more efficiently.

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Oh Gimme Strength!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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He’s only gone and done it again!

First Obama got his nose stuck in Russia’s affairs, and now he’s pointing a nostril at China’s.

What is wrong with US politicians these days? They know nothing about foreign policy or foreign regimes come to that, yet they continue to try to dictate how everyone else should be behaving themselves.

These things aren’t any of our business and American Presidents, Secretaries of State and the rest are not doing themselves, or their country, any favors by getting involved in foreign disputes that don’t concern them.

You could understand it if they knew what they were talking about, but the long list of failed initiatives and interventions shows clearly they don’t. No one respects their opinion any more and economically and militarily strong nations, like Russia and China, certainly aren’t going to lie down and buckle under because of any outside interference.

 

So far US meddling in other people’s affairs has caused a catastrophe in the Middle East, ill will in Europe, sanctions against Russia that don’t work, and now interfering in what is happening in Hong Kong has done nothing but irritate the Chinese government. They’ve actually told America to butt out and mind their own business.

What they actually said was “Hong Kong affairs fall entirely within China’s internal affairs. We hope that some countries and people can be prudent in their words and deeds, refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Hong Kong in any way, do not support the illegal activities such as the ‘Occupy Central,’ and do not send any wrong signals.”

Like I said – butt out!

The Chinese government will do what they are going to do, no matter what criticism it draws from the rest of the world. China is not a democracy so it is pointless to try to impose democratic ideals on it and its people. You can be sure that those in charge in China will eventually put down the current protests, violently if necessary. All that will be achieved by egging the protesters on will be a disaster like the Tiananmen Square massacre. How many lives is it worth to embarrass China on the media for a few days?

Apart from the un-informed who only parrot what they hear on heavily skewed TV newscasts, most of the rest of us are fed up with people dying in order to make the world safe for democracy.

America has a cart load of problems, economic, social and the rest, without taking on the ills of the rest of the world as well, especially when it hasn’t a clue how to solve them.

Time for a rethink, assuming that any thought was put into what they are currently doing.

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Did You Know? The Fact File Is Open Again.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Yes, the fact file is open again.

Another random selection covering science, music, history, archaeology, nature and even brain surgery!

Enjoy.

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Women blink twice as much as men.

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Picking up baby birds and returning them to their nests

will not cause their mothers to reject them.

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It takes food approximately seven seconds

to get from your mouth to your stomach.

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The brain has no pain receptors so it doesn’t feel anything.

This is why doctors are able to perform open brain surgery

on patients that are still awake.

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But brain surgery is not something new.

In the past some cultures practiced “trepanation”,

or the act of drilling holes in the brain

to alleviate pain and cure sickness.

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More than 5 million people live in areas

that are considered to be “contaminated”

with radioactive material from the Chernobyl disaster.

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The body of the last English King to die in battle, Richard III,

was finally found buried under a Leicester car park

in what was one of the most astonishing

archaeological discoveries of the last few decades.

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The Chinese government

attempted to crack down on gift giving

by banning certain luxury commercials.

The economy immediately started falling.

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Disney Park employees are required to point

with either the whole hand or using two fingers.

This is because some cultures see pointing

with one finger as disrespectful

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Dropping a penny from the top of the

Empire State Building would not kill someone

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Lemur comes from a Latin word that means

“spirit of the dead”.

The person that named them cited their

nocturnal nature as a source of influence.

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For many years scientists couldn’t figure out

how the Earth’s solid inner core spins one way

and the liquid outer core spins the other.

Scientists at Leeds University recently found

that the answer lies in a simple “equal and opposite” reaction

based around Earth’s magnetic fields.

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The word “Addict” comes from ancient Rome

when soldiers were awarded slaves known as “addicts”,

which is the Latin word for slave.

It eventually came to refer to a person

who was a slave to anyone or anything.

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Air Force One is not the name of a specific plane,

but the name of any plane carrying the president.

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The Beatles still hold the record for the

most number-one singles in the Billboard Charts.

They had twenty in all

and their biggest seller was “Hey Jude”.

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