The Jack Ryan novel, True Faith and Allegiance, is a fictionalized account of just how destructive the OPM hack could be. The power of data fusion is amazing, especially when deployed against clueless persons who don’t even know what they’ve lost, or those determined to minimize the extent of what they’ve lost to avoid embarrassment.
Until the last years of the Obama administration officials simply turned a blind eye to Chinese hacking.
Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.
NPR
He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.
“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”
Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.
But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.
“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”
Maybe the good old global world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.