It is being called a Cyber Pearl Harbor.

The announcement  last week by the Office of Personnel Management that hackers have acquired the Social Security numbers and other intimate information about millions of government employees has federal workers reeling. OPM promised to send notifications to the millions of affected individuals, which is not quite the same thing as protecting their information in the first place. Here’s the most shocking fact: the government had not done the minimum and ensured that the information was encrypted.

The Obama Administration is claiming that the hacking was done by the Chinese. Particularly worrisome is the possibility that stolen information can be used to blackmail people. This has profound implications for those who do covert work.

MSNBC has more on this story:

"The potential loss here is truly staggering and, by the way, these records are a legitimate foreign intelligence target," said retired Gen. Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director. "This isn't shame on China. This is shame on us."

The SF 86 form, which is 127-pages long, is extraordinarily comprehensive and intrusive.

Among other things, applicants must list where they have lived; contacts with foreign citizens and travel abroad; the names and personal details of relatives; illegal drug use and mental health counseling except in limited circumstances.

A review of appeals of security denials published on the web shows the variety of information now in possession of the hackers, including financial troubles, infidelities, psychiatric diagnoses, substance abuse, health issues and arrests.

"It's kind of scary that somebody could know that much about us," said a former senior U.S. diplomat, pointing out the ability to use such data to impersonate an American official online, obtain passwords and plunder bank accounts.

…

A U.S. official familiar with security procedures, but who declined to be identified, said some agencies do not use OPM for clearances, meaning their employees' data was at first glance less likely to have been compromised.

However, the former senior diplomat said someone with access to a complete set of SF 86 forms and to the names of officials at U.S. embassies, which are usually public, could compare the two and make educated guesses about who might be a spy.

…

A review of appeals of security denials published on the web shows a variety of information now in possession of the hackers, including financial troubles, infidelities, psychiatric diagnoses, substance abuse, health issues and arrests.

The government is inept at many things and security of Americans' private information is emerging as a big one that should concern every citizen.

Jim Geraghty called attention to President Obama’s lack of urgency in addressing the hacking in remarks a week ago:

This is going to be a big project and we’re going to have to keep on doing it, because both state and non-state actors are sending everything they’ve got at trying to breach these systems. In some cases, it’s non-state actors who are engaging in criminal activity and potential theft. In the case of state actors, they’re probing for intelligence or, in some cases, trying to bring down systems in pursuit of their various foreign policy objectives. In either case, we’re going to have to be much more aggressive, much more attentive than we have been.
 

Says Garaghty:

Are you feeling the fury? Yeah.
 

But it’s not just conservatives who are hacked off, so to speak, at the Administration's failure to protect sensitive information. Unions are also firing back about the government’s irresponsibility. In a letter to OPM director Katherine Archuleta. David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said "We believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees."

He called the failure to encrypt "an abysmal failure on the part of the agency to guard data that has been entrusted to it by the federal workforce."