Neither case is encouraging, but one is particularly unsettling - and it isn't the one involving scouting reports and obscure statistics that require an education from MIT to understand.
Large swaths of federal employee data had no security authorization in place at all, while several key databases of sensitive national security information were apparently not up to federal standards.
Meanwhile, we're just now learning the hackers of unknown Chinese origin actually gained entry into the system more than a year ago and have been sitting back, collecting data all this time.
Sensitive security clearance and background information was compromised for somewhere between 4 million and 14 million federal employees. Whether or not that includes military personnel and Congressional staff seems to depend on who you ask at the moment.
"You failed. You failed utterly and totally," House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said to Katherine Archuleta, the head of the Office of Personnel Management.
While normally after such an embarrassment we might expect to simply see a shuffle to fill the void left at OPM after Archuleta's head rolls, the president still seems to believe she's the right person for the job.
Those shuffles rarely seem to fix such problems anyway, and lip service and empty promises isn't the resolution we'd like to see here.
As we move forward into a more interconnected world, aka "the Internet of things," data security will only become more and more important, and with the government collecting more information, not just on its personnel, but its citizens as well, it's time for our lawmakers to ensure it becomes a priority.
©2015 the Moscow-Pullman Daily News (Moscow, Idaho) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
