Congressman Darrell Issa should be angry. He’s not the shy, retiring type. He likes acting on his anger and enjoys it when other folks watch. His latest source of ire is Marilyn Taverner. It turns out that the HHS IT system for Obamacare has been hacked and used as a platform for malware. He explains below.

“Considering this administration launched Healthcare.gov over the objections of CMS, it’s unsurprising that the website has suffered a ‘malicious attack,’” Issa said in a statement. “For nearly a year, the administration has dismissed concerns about the security of Healthcare.gov, even as it obstructed congressional oversight of the issue.”

Now the usual bureaucrats are claiming no harm occurred, no personal information was compromised, it was just a test stub instead of the real db, yada, yada, yada…The thing I noticed wasn’t so much that it’s never Barry’s fault. It’s that nobody who has looked into this system is really surprised. That tells us two things.
1) O-Care is a hosed-up klugewear program, designed to get online as fast as possible regardless of an occasional glitch or work-around. That’s not of great interest. I’m actually impressed this Executive Branch could even get spaghetti code to compile. We move on to a deeper structural issue.
2) The Internet is amazingly difficult to secure and the impact of that can harm people decades after they have made themselves vulnerable in some way.

Ask any of the recent Hollywood Actresses exposed by 4chan how secure The Internet truly is. If it were just the government that sucked and was unethical, we’d be rereading the boring story that has become a fundamental conceit of the American experience since President Eisenhower issued his prescient warnings in his farewell address. But it’s not just government – it’s the entire set of industries that rely on The Internet. Just how far-reaching is this problem? Here’s a worst-case scenario below.

“Nothing, but nothing, that is stored on the cloud can be considered ‘safe’ from hacking. Not your credit card information. Not your banking credentials. Not a law firm’s merger and acquisitions plans. Not a defense contractor’s design schematics for fighter jets. Not chemical formulas for drugs in development. Not source code for the world’s mightiest companies. And definitely not naked pictures, no matter who you are….“The true scandal of the fappening*—the one really useful thing about it—is that you couldn’t wish for a clearer demonstration of how all of us now entrust the most private information about ourselves to the guardianship of public companies that have consistently proven themselves unworthy of that trust.”

This sounds overblown. Or not. Iran either did, or did not, successfully hack into and cyberjack a US Reconnaissance Drone. If the Iranians can’t hack drones, The University of Texas has trained people who can Hook ‘Em.

SkyNet this isn’t – at least not yet. Yet it could be an awesome assassination technique. Or maybe; assuming a cybernetic takeover of a major US securities exchange, it would be Black Friday all over again. We’ve demonstrated that our information superhighway is no more secure than our Southern Border. The people who have the power to provide that security are amply paid to sell that data on people rather than lock it away. Internet privacy will remain as much an oxymoron as honor among whores as long as data can be profitably used for marketing, politics, law enforcement and a lot of other purposes that most of us would not want our data being used for.

So one day we might just get totally hammered. One day SkyNet really might become self-aware. Or perhaps ISIS could become your market-maker on Super-DOT or the COMEX. Something worse could happen. This corrupt, insecure system could just chug along until any sense of safety or privacy is a memory of the past. In a possible dystopia, it will be the angry and scared silent majority that will shut down The Internet. People will demand their lives back. The Censors won’t have to lift a finger to shut it all down.

*-Don’t look up what fappening is. It’s for utter degenerates.