Hacked OPM won't cough up documents on mega-breach – claim The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) – which handles sensitive files on millions of government workers and was thoroughly ransacked by hackers – is withholding thousands of documents from Congress, which is probing the cyber-attack. This is according to members of the House Committee on Oversight, who took OPM to task …
Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. What exactly is this mysterious "self-interest" that is impelling members of congress to investigate the OPM data breach?
They are in exactly the same boat as millions of other government employees.
The data has already been stolen. Do you understand that? So how members of congress would find themselves in a position different than any other government employee in regard to this is a riddle. You need to try to learn how the world works.
Be certain that the amount of publicly-available information on members of congress far exceeds anything that the OPM had in its files. And since the OPM data was self-submitted, it doesn't include anything that anyone would really want to hide. Any foreign power - or local political opponent, for that matter - would have the incentive and the ability to easily gather more data, and more sensitive data, and potentially far more damaging data, than what members of congress voluntarily submit to the OPM. They live with that every day.
So the situation of member of congress, consequential to the OPM breach, remains... completely unchanged.
It's all the other government employees that find themselves in a, shall we say, new situation, with their data being available to and pored over by heaven only knows whom, and for what purpose. Member of congress are probably very accustomed to living with threats like this; your average government employee, probably not.
Even leaving aside the data that is publicly available, via the courts, or credit bureaus, or similar, for both congressmen and other government employees, the amount of illegally-obtained data seems to be so vast that one has to wonder how much of effect the OPM breach actually had on them.
Members of congress have to expect to be the subjects of inquiry and investigation, both legal and covert, from all sorts of quarters and entities - foreign, local, political, journalistic, etc etc etc, and would probably be grateful if the stolen OPM data was the worst threat that they had to contend with. But it's not. And members of congress probably have less to worry about the OPM data breach than almost anyone else.
Learn to think about things.
The base data certainly was self-submitted and the subject of the investigation will know what it was. I know what I put in my SF86. A good deal of additional information will be there too, such things as credit status and in some instances medical or psychological information, and criminal history. Subjects will know, or could, most of that as well. The SF86 is submitted along with signed releases to collect quite a lot of data.
What I, and other subjects do not know is what additional information was added based on interviews with references and others identified during the review process. An incumbent politician might very well have an interest in knowing that, or background investigation information about others who are or might become their adversaries or opponents.
My comment was more directed at the "response" of outrage, etc. They haven't been outraged at anything else along lines of security breaches until now. OPM is dragging it's feet on this and yes, they need to be looked at very carefully. But, being an election year, there's a sense of drama here.
The breach should never have happened. All those documents should never have been facing the web. It is an outrage and it should be fixed. I wouldn't be surprised if the documents are still available to a breach.
OPM is not the only agency that seems to drag its feet in answering information requests. I have a federal FOIA request pending since March, 2015 for documents which (if actually exist) should be possible to unfile and copy in under a week. I expect there are quite a few here and there that are older.
I was advised in late December that the target date is some time in June, 2016.
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