Should we worry about our National Security?
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Pandora (
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July 20th, 2015
Today cheaters from Ashley Madison found out that the site was hacked. A big portion of users are in Washington DC., (like Gomer Pyle would say) surprise, surprise!
Any way Asley Madison says that it is true they were hacked but they now have security back. LOL. A little to late.
Anyhow, the hackers say they have information of peoples credit cards, their sexual preferences and kinks and who they have met and job information and home addresses.
So at first I laughed. Karma can be a bit harsh. But then I began to think of how many government officials and contractors with knowledge of sensitive material may actually be on those sites and can now be blackmailed.
Do you think it is something the american public should be worried about?
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I know about those but there is a difference between them finding out personal facts that they could easily research,to finding out dirty little secrets that people may be inclined to try to cover up.
For instance. If I worked for the government and have done nothing wrong, I could change my credit cards and get credit cards alerts and put guards on my banking stuff, like I do now. I could even change my SS probably. They could put my name, address and phone numbers. No matter, the internet always updates those without me wanting them to anyway. I could even change my bank account. So all no big deal. Only big deal is if you are big in debt and they found that out, than you can be a security problem. But most people who are huge in debt aren’t put in high clearance jobs. They have to be vetted for their security clearances and there are different stages.
But a secret like an affair can ruin reputations and marriages that they may not want to do because a divorce will cost them a pretty penny,and even some jobs if they feel you are a security risk. So I think that is actually worse. Plus military move all the time. So even their addresses change.
As for what the government can do about it? I’ve given it some thought. They need to get involved and find out if anyone associated with the government or maybe things like power plants or a job that can be in someway a threat to the public, an ultimatum to either reveal their secret to their jobs and spouses or quit their jobs and everything will be kept quiet on their end. This way the information, one way or the other is useless to the hacker.
I wonder how long it will be before the NSA is hacked and all of the data that they have been collecting gets leaked for all to see.
Emails, text messages, phone calls, websites searched…. All in one place.
Guess this might have an upside assuming politicians and corporate execs also get leaked.
There is a big difference between the AshMad break in and, for example the one at the office of personnel management. In the former most of the accounts are fake; the credit card info is bogus or tied to single use cards; the names of the few real clients are also fake. The hackers got a pile of junk. They did grab a list of emails – the same list that AshMad sells to every other porn spammer willing to pay a few bucks.
Relax, the big boys with big toys in Washington would never use a site like AshMad. They have alternatives.
Should we worry? Maybe, maybe not.
Worrying about something you have no control over seems to be a waste of time. Someone should be worrying about the Ashley Madison and OPM hacks, sure. But it’s not worth my thought cycles because I am 40 steps removed from having any effect on any of that.
If I were a nasty-minded and controlling ‘internal security’ person in Washington DC, and I wanted to identify people that I could blackmail and throw in jail, or force to do my bad deeds, I could see nothing better than Ashley Madison to identify self-declared people of minimal moral standards.
Conspiracy theory time: – Could Ashley Madison have been a fully owned operating arm of the NSA?
Think about it—a ready made groups of tens of millions of people they could coerce and control.
and ‘Madison’ was a former president… a sign of the government connection. And Ashley refers to Ashley Wilkes, from Gone With the Wind, who was a patriotic Southerner during the Civil War
It’s 2015, you think someone would actually succumb to blackmail over cheating on a spouse?
Yes, this could easily become a national security problem. Anytime compromising information concerning government workers is gathered, national security is at stake as this could easily turn people working in sensitive areas. Should the citizens be worried? Other than keeping a small footprint on the net, there isn’t a lot they can do about it. That is the National Security Agency’s job, through their Signals Intelligence departments, among others.
Every major government on the globe, including ours, monitors the internet for the purposes of collecting, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. Identifying trends and weaknesses within a society, exploiting and enhancing it’s fears of conspiracy, identifying and encouraging small groups with anti-government or anarchic tendencies, etc., can be easily exploited with propaganda and psy-ops campaigns, creating yet another thorn in the side of one’s enemy. Hacking a country’s central banking system can temporarily interrupt the enemy’s markets and threaten their economy. This is called network warfare and it is very real and can be damaging to a targeted government. The job description is to be a constant nuisance to the enemy. Everybody does it.
China has become especially adept at this. The recent hacks into our major Healthcare insurance agencies has been attributed to the Chinese government. They have been able to acquire personal health information on tens of thousands of U.S. government workers and contractors which may prove compromising in that this info could be used to blackmail these people who may have their careers curtailed if certain health problems that they have been hiding from their employer is exposed.
In the Ashley Madison case, a person might divulge sensitive information to an enemy in order to keep their peccadillos from becoming public knowledge. This is a possibility our government security agencies would be remiss to ignore.
I may be extremely naive, but what exactly does AM have to do with this? If it’s being proposed that marital infidelity opens the door for government employees to be exposed to blackmail, then why is AM particularly relevant. When there is infidelity, there is by definition a person who is in on the secret and can threaten to bring down a marriage, etc. This seems to be the type of exposure many people here are concerned about. Adding AM to the mix doesn’t significantly change the variables, right?
Also, I’ll assume (without any empirical evidence) that government workers with high security clearance are both frequently vetted and pretty careful. Their extra-marital activity is probably not craigslist and AM.
And finally, I agree with @zenvelo – blackmail over marital infidelity? I’m not convinced this happens.
More than 21 million current and former federal employees files were hacked! In the past few weeks.
@si3tech – how many of the federal employees were also customers of Ashley Madison?
@zenvelo & @DoNotKnow I think you’re being naïve. It’s not the infidelity issues that can prove embarrassing to these people, it’s their sexual preferences – acts – that they may wish to hide. What is considered immoral in America changes with region: Whereas there are more liberal live-and-let-live urban sectors such as the San Francisco area and Manhattan Island, there is also the Bible Belt and conservative Washington. Trust me, you guys are outnumbered. HR people and agency and corporate heads in many of the more uptight places will find a way to get rid of somebody they feel is “indecent.” regardless of the laws that protect them. One cn quickly become persona non-grata. Perhaps their performance evals suddenly become increasingly worse, or they’re responsibilities are slowly removed and replaced with grunt work which can ensure their careers go nowhere. These are incentives for an “undesireable” to leave the company. HR and the bosses will always provide valid reasons. These protection laws are often toothless, and many people, if complaints may further expose them, may forgo any resistance.
You guys need to get out every once in awhile and see ugly America at it’s worst.
@zenvelo Yes. People with money like to keep their money. This would be an easy dunk for a divorce attorney, unless they had a prenup. And yes. Some politicians survive and some don’t. And the only reason it ever came out is because they were caught. Not because they ever decided to take a chance on public votes and came out about their affair before it went public. And do I need to remind you that most of the Republican party that votes for their politicians like their candidates married and with no weird fetishes, not gay, and not mixing with other races. If you read the news every couple of days you would swear you stepped back in time.
@elbanditoroso LOL. I like how you think. Is it possible? Sure why not. Never say never.
@si3tech Read my comment above as to why that really isn’t a big deal.
@Espiritus_Corvus: “You guys need to get out every once in awhile and see ugly America at it’s worst.”
You’re probably right. I had a friend who did his post-doc in Missouri. He admitted that his Massachusetts->Vermont->California experience up until that point had not prepared him for the nightmare of the midwest. Anyway, I did say I was probably being naiive.
Considering all the call girls who work in and around D.C., who know all the little intimate details on our politician’s sex lives, including all their little kinks and fetishes, who could blackmail any of them at any time, no – I don’t think national security is at stake here.
@Pandora I don’t disagree with you, but how come it is all the Republicans who get caught doing sex acts they preach against?
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