This isn't credit card data we're talking about here, this is just about all the information you can get on someone.
And has been collated and verified through alternate sources. It's not like you can give a bunch of fake information every time you renew your access (security clearance or otherwise) - they check it against what they already have and what they get from other agencies and your references and follow up if there are significant changes/differences.
It wasn't clear if that laptop had all the content of the SF-85/85P/86 forms, I don't think they admitted to it being more than the information they used as default passwords for the eQIP system plus basic ID information of who they belonged to. The OPM breach is the complete contents of the forms that everyone filled out since 2000, plus all the investigation data (not much if you're an SF-85, but potentially quite a lot if you're an SF-86). And they had such poor security that they pretty much gave it all away.
And it's likely that other US subs have spent as much or more time submerged since then, though it may not be publicly advertised, or even acknowledged.
Subs are much larger than the mars dome thing, but may have less area per person. WWII era subs were pretty small for the number of people aboard and could do ~60 day patrols without getting off the boat, though they would surface (mostly at night) and people could get a little fresh air occasionally.
And for a process supposedly based on data, it ignores the largest data point that has been validated with over a 100 years of research: after 40 hours your employees aren't contributing anything. In knowledge based economies it's even lower, after about 30 hours you're just killing time.
Just quoting this part, but the rest of your post is a worthwhile read, too--I'd mod it up if I had points.
I've seen a lot of people who "work 80+ hour weeks" it's pretty rare that any of them are doing even 30 hours of productive work most of the time. In some cases they're such a mess that they're breaking things and moving things backwards. It's one thing to have a crunch and work double for a week or two or three. Sometimes it happens, and in many cases you can even be productive for it. But when people try to sustain it, it breaks things. Where I am, QA are expected to stop you from working if you've been on shift more than 12 hours and are touching hardware. Or even if you look tired. And if it's friday and there's a big task that has to get done? Sometimes the best thing you can do is send everybody home-- stuff gets broken on friday afternoons and weekends when everybody's tired and in a hurry.
If they're getting paid per impression it would be very easy for them to serve ads that can't be easily blocked and are unobtrusive-- serve them from their own servers as part of the content and have an audit trail so advertisers can verify. Much like newspapers do. Nobody, as far as I know, chooses to do that. They'd rather just plug in a bit of code to let advertisers stick in their content, no matter how irritating.
Years ago I worked in the lab in a small company that addressed that very easily - we just put everybody in the lab in lab coats. Once you put on the lab coat, it doesn't really matter what you're wearing as long as you have closed toed shoes (which we had anyway). The type of lab work we were requiring didn't really need lab coats, but they also weren't particularly inconvenient or uncomfortable, either.
Where I am now, I can pretty much wear plain t-shirts and jeans every day, and shorts when it's warm, but I keep jeans around in case I have to go into a smock-only cleanroom (you have to have long pants, or else find a full bunny suit).
If only there were some type of a device that could provide unlimited communication wirelessly over a large area with only a small initial investment...
That would be great if I only ever needed to talk to co-workers, and there were only a few other roaming people on the site, rather than 5000+. I need to talk to a lot of external people (can't give them radios) and giving everybody who travels around the site a 2 way radio would make for some awfully busy radio traffic. Not to mention that it would be easy for anybody to listen in on all that as well.
There was a group of employees who managed to get company issued cellphones. These employees never took them off premises and were never on call. They left them at their desks to charge every night.
There are legitimate use cases for cell phones in the case you describe. I work on a 500+ acre work site with hundreds of buildings and my work takes me all over the site to the extent that there are days when I don't even see my desk. If I didn't have a company issued cell, it could be days before people got ahold of me by phone. It would still be perfectly reasonable to have a company issued phone, even if I never took it home.
All this adds up to a very very slim chance of this effort being successful, which is my point. They are not going to find alien life this way or any other way. Not in 10 years, not in 100. The odds are just so not in their favor...
Yes, I agree that the radio search for signals is extremely unlikely to be successful, but your posts so far have been referring to "life in general", not the specific "radio search for transmitters," which is entirely different.
The lack of known habitable exoplanets is very likely a selection effect resulting from techniques used so far to search. Rocky planets in the habitable zone are a lot harder to find than big gas giants that are either close in (so the transit a lot and wiggle the star) or far out (so you can actually isolate their photons from those of the star). Given where we find life on Earth, there are certainly many other habitable (in the microbial sense at least) environments off Earth in our solar system, and we've really barely checked them for anything, let alone microbes or the like.
You need to carefully distinguish "life", "intelligent life", and "habitable", as they're not interchangeable.
Only one experiment has explicitly looked for life on Mars: Viking. No other experiments have been successfully flown to other bodies in the solar system to detect microbial life. A number of the places proposed as possible places for life have never actually been investigated in detail (e.g. Europa, Enceladus). Venus could easily have had life in the past and we'd never detect it with anything we've done (the environment there is admittedly much harder to explore than the icy moons of the outer planets)
The types of things that people use to "look for life" on other planets would in many cases have trouble finding life on earth-- there's a great deal of debate about virtually all "fossil" evidence of the origins of life on earth.
A big moon so water life can spread to land. 1/100 (having a moon is a biggie).
Why do you need to spread life to land? There were probably a billion years or more of life on earth that was nothing but archaea, and it's still life and if things hadn't changed they would have kept on living as happily as archaea can be.
You're awfully confident in the uniqueness of life on earth, given that we really haven't even made much effort to determine its presence or absence in other potentially habitable places in our own solar system (and there are at least a few, and they aren't all planets in their own right), and that we've only had confirmation of the existence of extrasolar planets for less than 20 years. The statistics on extrasolar planets are still skewed by selection effects of the methods we use to look for them, despite the large numbers that we've discovered. When people did start discovering real extrasolar planetary systems, the existing models for planetary system formation did a terrible job of predicting the systems that were discovered. The jury is still very much out on how common life is in the universe, and even whether life could exist elsewhere in our own solar system.
NSA doesn't need to do any of that. Their budget is made up of money laundered through programs with boring names so nobody can tell what they get anyway.
And if they want the data all they have to do is ask OPM. Or offer to store backups for them. The privacy act protections are almost nonexistent and completely worthless.
I talked to someone recently who lost a day of science data from a UAV because the Windows system driving the instrument decided to auto update while in the air with something like a 56kbps data rate.
I recently built a field instrument and made it Linux based specifically to prevent things like that, as well as to keep power and latency down by being able to kill unnecessary background tasks.
Same in a car, or fighter jet for that matter: Want to see the time? Look at where the clock is. Want to see what radio station you're listening to? Look at where the tuner is. Want to see how much gas you've got? Look at where the fuel gauge is. This is constant-time lookup. If you have multifunction displays that *change* where these basic things are, now you've upped the cognitive load on the driver in that he now has to keep track of what state the display is in rather than just glancing in a well-remembered spot.
Ford did a pretty good job of this in the Cmax hybrids. The things you need to know to drive the car don't change location, and are the way they've been on cars forever. The speedometer is a big analog rotating needle, so you just have to glance at the needle position-- you don't have to evaluate numbers. The hybrid details are also displayed as analog dial information (using the LCD) to minimize mental processing. They're also in an unobtrusive side display of the driver's side triptych and you can choose from several default sets of details that all are consistent with showing the same information in the same way, but add new information if you pick the more detailed ones. The center console is for phone, entertainment system, climate, and nav, and can be controlled via the touchscreen, traditional controls that would be familiar if all you ever drove before is a car out of the 60s, or voice controls interchangeably. The more common things to adjust also have steering wheel controls, but it's all set up so the learning curve is easy and you can operate everything just fine with all the traditional controls.
But yeah. If you've got bells and whistles and distractions in your field of vision, of course it's unsafe. Most people are probably smart enough to ignore the popup message crap polluting automotive mutlifunction displays, by keeping their eyes up. If the crap follows them there, that's not an usafe display mechanism, that's unsafe human interface design. </rant>
that's what bugs me whenever I drive a prius- they decided to get creative and put things in non-standard positions, used digital displays where analog is faster to evaluate, put a whole bunch of distractive stuff in the driver's field of view, and made the front window small with huge pillars so it's hard to see out. It's a car that encourages people to drive badly.
No, at least parts of the government require full disk encryption of all laptops, as well as fully encrypted, two-factor auth remote access. NASA implemented full disk encryption in a rush after a similar personnel data set was stolen from an unencrypted laptop in a car in DC.
Two-factor authentication only means that in order to access the system you need two components, for example a Debit card and PIN, it doesn't necessarily limit access if you have those two components.
Other parts of the government already use more appropriate forms of two-factor authentication, generally smartcard badge+password, pin+rolling RSA key, or in some cases pin+password+rolling RSA key (not really more secure, and easier to forget pin+password). The badges and RSA keys have to be issued by the agency (and sometimes department) and synchronized-- I have a bag full of them from various agencies and aerospace companies and they're hard to keep track of. The badges are issued as a result of the whole background check process that was compromised and contain a hash of your fingerprints as well (some, though very few, computers have fingerprint readers). If they had implemented any of those, it's likely that the breach wouldn't have occurred. If, as you suggest, they had included access limits or almost any kind of access log checking, they could likely have detected and stopped a breach that was traceable to a forged/stolen credential as well.
Is it possible to separate the fields of the SF-86 form so after they get OCR-ed, the physical documents (if any) go to a secure site [1], and if electronic, it gets printed out. Hard copies are useful for long term archiving.
If you're going through OPM you fill out the SF86 online on a system called eQIP-- you get a pdf at the end that you can print and keep, but they collect all the data electronically. No OCR involved.
eQIP has its own problems-- the default passwords for entry are based on data that anybody can look up about you. You're supposed to change them so that when you submit your stuff for reinvestigation you use passwords that you made up, but given that they have specific password requirements (3 passwords) and reinvestigation is every 5+ years, you might as well just bang on they keyboard and then ask for a password reset when it's time to do it again.
As perpenso already noted-- you can move some of the data temporarily across the gap. Even whole files for people whose investigations are currently in progress. But given that reinvestigations are only every 5+ years, data that isn't immediately required can be isolated from the internet. In that case, if you suffer a data breach you still let out a bunch of confidential information on people, but you don't let *all* of it out on *everybody*. And some inputs to the database (e.g. invesitgation results that aren't needed for other investigators) can be swept to the isolated side on a regular basis.
"Most background information is not self-volunteered, it is gathered by FBI agents, etc., at their own discretion."
First, I'm not sure if this is correct. I'd be surprised if the FBI actually gathers info as part of clearance investigations, for instance.
But more importantly, the leak was SF86 data, right? That would be the forms, not every little detail of every mundane investigation.
The FBI doesn't do most of the investigations-- there are various investigating agencies and contractors depending on who you're going to do the cleared work for, but they do indeed do detailed investigations. I've been interviewed a few times for people's investigations, and mostly they ask benign things that you'd be willing to tell anyone (do you know about spouses/partners/dating habits, ever seen the person drink, ever seen them drunk, are they quiet vs. outgoing, do they overshare), but there are probably cases where they get into a lot of personal details if you give them something that might lead down a juicy path.
What I don't understand is why you would record all this information.
After you've gathered the information (somehow) and you decide someone's clearance level, what's the point of keeping it? If you grant a certain clearance level, that means that the data is by definition uninteresting, because anything interesting means you won't get clearance.
So that the gov't can use it to blackmail you into compliance? At least that's how it probably started. I don't get the impression that they do a lot of that since Hoover went away, but they kept all the systems because that's how they always did it. Now it may come back to bite...
A curious thing about the disclosures, is that your boss *doesn't* get the information that goes into the SF86 (at least if you're a contractor, may be different if you're a civil servant), only the government does. I never had a clearance, but know a lot of people who do, and it's not clear that you're required to disclose all the blackmailable things to the people you might be blackmailed with respect to (e.g. spouses), or just to the government. From what I can tell, I think it's just to the gov't. It seems very traceable to Hoover's FBI, where his personal goal seemed to be that he would get blackmail material for absolutely everyone he could so that he would have the ability to coerce people, rather than as the claimed prevention of blackmail by other parties.
I tend to agree that if you look at the process it does appear to be more of an ideological filter than real trust/security system.
Though if you whip out a spliff in the interview and assure them that it's your last one, you probavly won't get the clearance.
Things like that always seemed like they should depend a lot on where/when you are-- I think in parts of the country and for people of certain ages if you *don't* do that you should probably be a little suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't credit card data we're talking about here, this is just about all the information you can get on someone.
And has been collated and verified through alternate sources. It's not like you can give a bunch of fake information every time you renew your access (security clearance or otherwise) - they check it against what they already have and what they get from other agencies and your references and follow up if there are significant changes/differences.
Well it's worse now.
It wasn't clear if that laptop had all the content of the SF-85/85P/86 forms, I don't think they admitted to it being more than the information they used as default passwords for the eQIP system plus basic ID information of who they belonged to. The OPM breach is the complete contents of the forms that everyone filled out since 2000, plus all the investigation data (not much if you're an SF-85, but potentially quite a lot if you're an SF-86). And they had such poor security that they pretty much gave it all away.
These guys went around the world submerged in 60 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And it's likely that other US subs have spent as much or more time submerged since then, though it may not be publicly advertised, or even acknowledged.
Subs are much larger than the mars dome thing, but may have less area per person. WWII era subs were pretty small for the number of people aboard and could do ~60 day patrols without getting off the boat, though they would surface (mostly at night) and people could get a little fresh air occasionally.
And for a process supposedly based on data, it ignores the largest data point that has been validated with over a 100 years of research: after 40 hours your employees aren't contributing anything. In knowledge based economies it's even lower, after about 30 hours you're just killing time.
Just quoting this part, but the rest of your post is a worthwhile read, too--I'd mod it up if I had points.
I've seen a lot of people who "work 80+ hour weeks" it's pretty rare that any of them are doing even 30 hours of productive work most of the time. In some cases they're such a mess that they're breaking things and moving things backwards. It's one thing to have a crunch and work double for a week or two or three. Sometimes it happens, and in many cases you can even be productive for it. But when people try to sustain it, it breaks things. Where I am, QA are expected to stop you from working if you've been on shift more than 12 hours and are touching hardware. Or even if you look tired. And if it's friday and there's a big task that has to get done? Sometimes the best thing you can do is send everybody home-- stuff gets broken on friday afternoons and weekends when everybody's tired and in a hurry.
Some advertisers per impression.
If they're getting paid per impression it would be very easy for them to serve ads that can't be easily blocked and are unobtrusive-- serve them from their own servers as part of the content and have an audit trail so advertisers can verify. Much like newspapers do. Nobody, as far as I know, chooses to do that. They'd rather just plug in a bit of code to let advertisers stick in their content, no matter how irritating.
Years ago I worked in the lab in a small company that addressed that very easily - we just put everybody in the lab in lab coats. Once you put on the lab coat, it doesn't really matter what you're wearing as long as you have closed toed shoes (which we had anyway). The type of lab work we were requiring didn't really need lab coats, but they also weren't particularly inconvenient or uncomfortable, either.
Where I am now, I can pretty much wear plain t-shirts and jeans every day, and shorts when it's warm, but I keep jeans around in case I have to go into a smock-only cleanroom (you have to have long pants, or else find a full bunny suit).
If only there were some type of a device that could provide unlimited communication wirelessly over a large area with only a small initial investment...
That would be great if I only ever needed to talk to co-workers, and there were only a few other roaming people on the site, rather than 5000+. I need to talk to a lot of external people (can't give them radios) and giving everybody who travels around the site a 2 way radio would make for some awfully busy radio traffic. Not to mention that it would be easy for anybody to listen in on all that as well.
It's less hassle to just uninstall flash.
I don't miss it.
There was a group of employees who managed to get company issued cellphones. These employees never took them off premises and were never on call. They left them at their desks to charge every night.
There are legitimate use cases for cell phones in the case you describe. I work on a 500+ acre work site with hundreds of buildings and my work takes me all over the site to the extent that there are days when I don't even see my desk. If I didn't have a company issued cell, it could be days before people got ahold of me by phone. It would still be perfectly reasonable to have a company issued phone, even if I never took it home.
None of these problems exist with flash.
Flash has other problems:
- Major security holes
- Incredible resource hog that will hang your browser to load some stupid ad.
All this adds up to a very very slim chance of this effort being successful, which is my point. They are not going to find alien life this way or any other way. Not in 10 years, not in 100. The odds are just so not in their favor...
Yes, I agree that the radio search for signals is extremely unlikely to be successful, but your posts so far have been referring to "life in general", not the specific "radio search for transmitters," which is entirely different.
The lack of known habitable exoplanets is very likely a selection effect resulting from techniques used so far to search. Rocky planets in the habitable zone are a lot harder to find than big gas giants that are either close in (so the transit a lot and wiggle the star) or far out (so you can actually isolate their photons from those of the star). Given where we find life on Earth, there are certainly many other habitable (in the microbial sense at least) environments off Earth in our solar system, and we've really barely checked them for anything, let alone microbes or the like.
You need to carefully distinguish "life", "intelligent life", and "habitable", as they're not interchangeable.
Only one experiment has explicitly looked for life on Mars: Viking. No other experiments have been successfully flown to other bodies in the solar system to detect microbial life. A number of the places proposed as possible places for life have never actually been investigated in detail (e.g. Europa, Enceladus). Venus could easily have had life in the past and we'd never detect it with anything we've done (the environment there is admittedly much harder to explore than the icy moons of the outer planets)
The types of things that people use to "look for life" on other planets would in many cases have trouble finding life on earth-- there's a great deal of debate about virtually all "fossil" evidence of the origins of life on earth.
A big moon so water life can spread to land. 1/100 (having a moon is a biggie).
Why do you need to spread life to land? There were probably a billion years or more of life on earth that was nothing but archaea, and it's still life and if things hadn't changed they would have kept on living as happily as archaea can be.
You're awfully confident in the uniqueness of life on earth, given that we really haven't even made much effort to determine its presence or absence in other potentially habitable places in our own solar system (and there are at least a few, and they aren't all planets in their own right), and that we've only had confirmation of the existence of extrasolar planets for less than 20 years. The statistics on extrasolar planets are still skewed by selection effects of the methods we use to look for them, despite the large numbers that we've discovered. When people did start discovering real extrasolar planetary systems, the existing models for planetary system formation did a terrible job of predicting the systems that were discovered. The jury is still very much out on how common life is in the universe, and even whether life could exist elsewhere in our own solar system.
NSA doesn't need to do any of that. Their budget is made up of money laundered through programs with boring names so nobody can tell what they get anyway.
And if they want the data all they have to do is ask OPM. Or offer to store backups for them. The privacy act protections are almost nonexistent and completely worthless.
I talked to someone recently who lost a day of science data from a UAV because the Windows system driving the instrument decided to auto update while in the air with something like a 56kbps data rate.
I recently built a field instrument and made it Linux based specifically to prevent things like that, as well as to keep power and latency down by being able to kill unnecessary background tasks.
Same in a car, or fighter jet for that matter: Want to see the time? Look at where the clock is. Want to see what radio station you're listening to? Look at where the tuner is. Want to see how much gas you've got? Look at where the fuel gauge is. This is constant-time lookup. If you have multifunction displays that *change* where these basic things are, now you've upped the cognitive load on the driver in that he now has to keep track of what state the display is in rather than just glancing in a well-remembered spot.
Ford did a pretty good job of this in the Cmax hybrids. The things you need to know to drive the car don't change location, and are the way they've been on cars forever. The speedometer is a big analog rotating needle, so you just have to glance at the needle position-- you don't have to evaluate numbers. The hybrid details are also displayed as analog dial information (using the LCD) to minimize mental processing. They're also in an unobtrusive side display of the driver's side triptych and you can choose from several default sets of details that all are consistent with showing the same information in the same way, but add new information if you pick the more detailed ones. The center console is for phone, entertainment system, climate, and nav, and can be controlled via the touchscreen, traditional controls that would be familiar if all you ever drove before is a car out of the 60s, or voice controls interchangeably. The more common things to adjust also have steering wheel controls, but it's all set up so the learning curve is easy and you can operate everything just fine with all the traditional controls.
But yeah. If you've got bells and whistles and distractions in your field of vision, of course it's unsafe. Most people are probably smart enough to ignore the popup message crap polluting automotive mutlifunction displays, by keeping their eyes up. If the crap follows them there, that's not an usafe display mechanism, that's unsafe human interface design. </rant>
that's what bugs me whenever I drive a prius- they decided to get creative and put things in non-standard positions, used digital displays where analog is faster to evaluate, put a whole bunch of distractive stuff in the driver's field of view, and made the front window small with huge pillars so it's hard to see out. It's a car that encourages people to drive badly.
No, at least parts of the government require full disk encryption of all laptops, as well as fully encrypted, two-factor auth remote access. NASA implemented full disk encryption in a rush after a similar personnel data set was stolen from an unencrypted laptop in a car in DC.
Two-factor authentication only means that in order to access the system you need two components, for example a Debit card and PIN, it doesn't necessarily limit access if you have those two components.
Other parts of the government already use more appropriate forms of two-factor authentication, generally smartcard badge+password, pin+rolling RSA key, or in some cases pin+password+rolling RSA key (not really more secure, and easier to forget pin+password). The badges and RSA keys have to be issued by the agency (and sometimes department) and synchronized-- I have a bag full of them from various agencies and aerospace companies and they're hard to keep track of. The badges are issued as a result of the whole background check process that was compromised and contain a hash of your fingerprints as well (some, though very few, computers have fingerprint readers). If they had implemented any of those, it's likely that the breach wouldn't have occurred. If, as you suggest, they had included access limits or almost any kind of access log checking, they could likely have detected and stopped a breach that was traceable to a forged/stolen credential as well.
Is it possible to separate the fields of the SF-86 form so after they get OCR-ed, the physical documents (if any) go to a secure site [1], and if electronic, it gets printed out. Hard copies are useful for long term archiving.
If you're going through OPM you fill out the SF86 online on a system called eQIP-- you get a pdf at the end that you can print and keep, but they collect all the data electronically. No OCR involved.
eQIP has its own problems-- the default passwords for entry are based on data that anybody can look up about you. You're supposed to change them so that when you submit your stuff for reinvestigation you use passwords that you made up, but given that they have specific password requirements (3 passwords) and reinvestigation is every 5+ years, you might as well just bang on they keyboard and then ask for a password reset when it's time to do it again.
As perpenso already noted-- you can move some of the data temporarily across the gap. Even whole files for people whose investigations are currently in progress. But given that reinvestigations are only every 5+ years, data that isn't immediately required can be isolated from the internet. In that case, if you suffer a data breach you still let out a bunch of confidential information on people, but you don't let *all* of it out on *everybody*. And some inputs to the database (e.g. invesitgation results that aren't needed for other investigators) can be swept to the isolated side on a regular basis.
"Most background information is not self-volunteered, it is gathered by FBI agents, etc., at their own discretion."
First, I'm not sure if this is correct. I'd be surprised if the FBI actually gathers info as part of clearance investigations, for instance.
But more importantly, the leak was SF86 data, right? That would be the forms, not every little detail of every mundane investigation.
The FBI doesn't do most of the investigations-- there are various investigating agencies and contractors depending on who you're going to do the cleared work for, but they do indeed do detailed investigations. I've been interviewed a few times for people's investigations, and mostly they ask benign things that you'd be willing to tell anyone (do you know about spouses/partners/dating habits, ever seen the person drink, ever seen them drunk, are they quiet vs. outgoing, do they overshare), but there are probably cases where they get into a lot of personal details if you give them something that might lead down a juicy path.
What I don't understand is why you would record all this information.
After you've gathered the information (somehow) and you decide someone's clearance level, what's the point of keeping it? If you grant a certain clearance level, that means that the data is by definition uninteresting, because anything interesting means you won't get clearance.
So that the gov't can use it to blackmail you into compliance? At least that's how it probably started. I don't get the impression that they do a lot of that since Hoover went away, but they kept all the systems because that's how they always did it. Now it may come back to bite...
A curious thing about the disclosures, is that your boss *doesn't* get the information that goes into the SF86 (at least if you're a contractor, may be different if you're a civil servant), only the government does. I never had a clearance, but know a lot of people who do, and it's not clear that you're required to disclose all the blackmailable things to the people you might be blackmailed with respect to (e.g. spouses), or just to the government. From what I can tell, I think it's just to the gov't. It seems very traceable to Hoover's FBI, where his personal goal seemed to be that he would get blackmail material for absolutely everyone he could so that he would have the ability to coerce people, rather than as the claimed prevention of blackmail by other parties.
I tend to agree that if you look at the process it does appear to be more of an ideological filter than real trust/security system.
Though if you whip out a spliff in the interview and assure them that it's your last one, you probavly won't get the clearance.
Things like that always seemed like they should depend a lot on where/when you are-- I think in parts of the country and for people of certain ages if you *don't* do that you should probably be a little suspect.