Missed Opportunities

In the world of Inspector General reports words are very carefully chosen.  As we shall see over the next couple of days, the Congressional report words describing the debacle of losing 20+ million security clearance records from the Office of Personnel Management will be spun and doctored by competing politicians who only know how the present one side of a two sided issue.  The first press reports of the report due out today have described the fiasco as "a series of missed opportunities".  This is much like saying the sinking of the Titanic was a series of missed opportunities, which almost means someone turned their head for a moment and missed what was going on.  It could happen to anyone, we might think.

I listened to a recording of a speech given by one of the investigators of this mess and it didn't sound like something that just happened by accident and might have been prevented had someone just turned their head back in that instant.  The Chinese were in that system for 3 years.  They were in and out frequently and took information on the formatting and database structures of multiple databases inside the spaghetti network that made up OPM.  They were into government systems and contractor systems.  What that gave them the opportunity to do was falsify records, delete them, or take them.  This is not a little thing that might have been prevented if only a few people had been paying attention.

Political spin will not make this gross negligence go away.  The incompetence of their security team came out in the hearings after the events unfolded in the press, but the seniors who covered it up were the worst offenders.  Given the seriousness of the data, that should have been pretty high up in the Administration.  These people "missed opportunities" to correct the problems over a span of 3 years and they knew somebody was in the system over most of that time.  The Director eventually resigned which is a clear indication of just how high up the paper-over of the attacks were.  Like Debbie Wasserman Shultz, she "took one for the team" who knew what was going on but tried hard to keep it out of the press so they were not taken for fools.