"OPM's data security posture was akin to leaving all your doors and windows unlocked and hoping nobody would walk in and take the information

The problem appears to be that the Chinese built the system that OPM used to store all the information it had on government employees. They didn't need to hack it, they had the keys because they built the locks.

Shock: Katharine Archuleta Is a Democrat Machine Hack With Scarcely Any Qualifications Except Loyalty To, and Dependency Upon, Democrat Patronage

But wait, there's more:

Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'"

OPM Breach Includes Congressional Staffers

See video of congressional hearings.  The administrators testifying are both arrogant and stupid.

White liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites

James Taranto has an excellent essay on a recent poll that asks participants who is more racist.  Head the whole essay here, but here is the delicious part.

It's not surprising that whites would be more apt to impute racism to blacks than to whites. Thus the partisan and ideological breakdowns are about what one would expect, given that most conservatives, and especially most Republicans, are white.

But the results for blacks are a big surprise. Blacks are more likely (by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals (regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white. Which reinforces a point we've made often in this column: that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.

You can see it in the MSM, on college campuses and on the Internet. To take the latter as an example, the Volokh conspiracy is a blog owned by impeccably white and mostly Libertarian law professors. For reasons that are not totally clear (perhaps it's the composition of the legal profession) the site draws a large number of commenters who are somewhere to the Left of Karl Marx (exaggeration for effect). Here is a great example from degsme who denies that America was founded as - and has been - a liberal democracy:

As has been pointed out below, the USA's democracy has hardly been "liberal" in its values, be it 100+ years of slavery followed by another 100 years of oppression of minority rights or the suppression of women's bodily integrity, or the genocide of native tribes, or the wholesale "manifest destiny" oppression of hispanics in the SW. this makes it a touch hypocritical to look at someone like Morsi and argue that he is "illiberal" by comparison. What he asks for of women is nothing much more than what the USA demanded a mere 50-60 years ago, and he's hardly proposing slavery, and the response to the "Ground Zero Mosque" is hardly an example of majority religious tolerance.

Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans

By Michael Isikoff, National Investigative Correspondent for NBC News takes the government line.

"Nothing to see here folks, move along."

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

You're going to see a lot of that "mistakenly" in reporting along with the overused word "unexpectedly."

Obama's Internet Spying

Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers

Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

China unveiled tighter Internet controls on Friday

 Can the Obama administration be far behind?  Don't want to fall behind the Chinese, you know.  Take Tom Friedman's word for it.

Bill Whittle on a Virtuous People - "The Common Sense Resistance"

Semen Soaked Suite

I always wonder about the carpet in the hotel rooms.  But the walls?

Roundup of Blogdom

Doug Ross @ Journal has a roundup of some of the best commentary around (icluding mine).

News from around the world.

Turkey discovers weapons in Iran plane.

Turkish media reports plane forced to land in southeast Turkey carried rocket launchers, mortars, rifles and explosive materials

Syria Protests Spread

Unrest spread in southern Syria on Monday with hundreds of people demonstrating against the government in three towns near the main city of Deraa, but authorities did not use force to quell the latest protests.

U.S. Says Libyan Campaign to Ease as No-Fly Zone Is Secured

The fighting “should recede in the next few days,” Gates said at a press conference in Moscow today. Opposition fighters advanced on the central gateway city of Ajdabiya, which is held by loyalist troops, according to the Associated Press. Qaddafi’s army units continued to shell the western, rebel-held city of Misrata for a second day, residents said.

Who's in charge? Germans pull forces out of NATO as Libyan coalition falls apart

Deep divisions between allied forces currently bombing Libya worsened today as the German military announced it was pulling forces out of NATO over continued disagreement on who will lead the campaign.


A German military spokesman said it was recalling two frigates and AWACS surveillance plane crews from the Mediterranean, after fears they would be drawn into the conflict if NATO takes over control from the U.S.
The infighting comes as a heated meeting of NATO ambassadors yesterday failed to resolve whether the 28-nation alliance should run the operation to enforce a U.N.-mandated no-fly zone, diplomats said.

'We are not at war,’

Opening the debate on French involvement in Libya, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon reiterated that the intervention was intended to stop attacks against Libyan civilians, and nothing more.

“We are not at war with Libya, we are protecting the civilian population,” said Fillon and added, “Our objectives are very specific... to protect the civilian population, excluding explicitly any occupation forces.”

Libya action 'impeachable'

President Barack Obama should be impeached for approving air strikes against Libya, Rep. Dennis Kucinich said in an interview Monday.

Obama’s Abu Ghraib: The Stuff Hits the Fan

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2003, the mainstream media and liberal blogosphere couldn’t find enough column inches to express adequately their shock and revulsion. The New York Times alone published 56 stories on the hideous revelation that members of the U.S. Army Reserve had tortured prisoners of war and posed for “trophy pictures”—inexcusable acts that the Times placed squarely at the feet of then-president George W. Bush.
What a difference a president makes. Until you flash forward to today’s bombshell, dropped by the British newspaper The Guardian, noting that members of a self-styled U.S. Army “kill team” posed for photos not with tortured prisoners but with corpses. Of civilians. Whom they had killed.
So far, the White House has released no statement regarding the images or accounts. Neither, surprisingly, has the New York Times.

Chavez says capitalism may have ended life on Mars
The Liberal ruler of Venezuela said

..."I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

Sexually assaulted and told 'You'll die tonight'... but spared as she's American: Female journalist's horror at the hands of Gaddafi's men

A female war photographer from the New York Times revealed tonight how she was repeatedly sexually assaulted during her nightmare hostage ordeal in Libya.

See how those photos of fighting are actually staged.

The Virginian Pilot cleans up its website, ignores the cause.

The Virginian Pilot has decided the anonymous comments degrade the quality of its website so they have decided that if people are going to be impolite, they will have to do it under their real names. I have to agree that anonymity give many people a cover to say a lot of obnoxious things.

But …. you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you? But where did the people whose foam flecked fingers write those hate-notes learn their craft? Unfortunately, they are the product of the Unofficial School of Journalism. Yes, folks, the “wingers” and “a**s-hats” were taught by those great folks who brought you the Virginian Pilot, MSNBC and the Comedy Channel, just for starters. The difference is that the anonymous commenters don’t have editors to clean up their grammar and didn’t get a degree in English Lit. so they’re a little cruder.

They strive to provide the same message as Daryl Lease, editorial writer for the Virginian Pilot who wrote this column which he used to club Christine O’Donnell and the Tea Party like a baby seal. In the course of a single column we find 6 references to “witch,” 4 to “Tea” and several not-so-subtle references to O’Donnell’s illiteracy, all wrapped in the theme that dressing up like patriots is a really stupid idea. Lease imagines himself something of a political humorist. In reality he’s simply a political bomb thrower who’s paid to polish his bombs before throwing, something that the anonymous commenters on the Pilot’s website don’t have the luxury of doing.

One of the great benefits of the internet is that it has freed the previously passive recipient of the MFM’s bile from having to sit and take it. The alternative was a letter to the editor – which was then at the not-so-tender mercies of the same people who were busy insulting their readers in the first place. I don’t know why people feel compelled to respond on a paper’s website. The Internet is out there. Start your own blog. Be your own editor. Seize control.

Hiding in plain sight just got a lot harder.

Eugene Robinson goes inveighing against what he calls the “shadowy” people behind the independent expenditures supporting Republicans.

The Republican grab for Congress is being funded by a pack of wolves masquerading as a herd of sheep.

 That seems to be a fault of Democracy, where speech is free, and people can band together to make their voices heard without the approval of people like Eugene Robinson and his allies in government. And if they want to keep their identities secret because of fear of political reprisals, they are accused of being in the pocket of "Big Oil" or "Big Casino" or - in Robinson's word:

gazillionaires who want to keep George W. Bush's tax breaks

Reprisals have become amazingly physical.

And reprisals include depriving someone of a job if they contribute to a cause that friends of Eugene Robinson don’t approve of.

You see, Eugene Robinson and his pals have not had much to fear when they beat up their opponents or have them fired. These events can take place in broad daylight, be videotaped and airbrushed out of existence by the same media that gives Eugene Robinson a prominent platform to label people who are afraid of him and his allies in the media, government and culture. Afraid of being beaten, kicked, slapped, prosecuted or fired for daring to agree with the majority of people in the country. To disagree with the Ruling Class is dangerous. They can take out their wrath on you in public and their actions will be hidden in plain sight.

Recently Robinson said that Christine O'Donnell: 

“looks like she might be a witch,”

Nice huh?

  

Thanks to the Internet and an Army of Davids, the MFM are not the ironclad gatekeepers of what people are allowed to know any longer. Hiding in plain sight has become a little harder for haters like Eugene Robinson.

UPDATE:  Instalanche:  Thanks, Glenn.

Remember when dissent was patriotic? If anyone tells you that the Tea Party is radical, remind them of this!

From the Dana Show

Listen to the whole thing:
"We're going to have to come out and kill somebody I guess."

George Bush as Hitler:

Sarah Palin as Hitler:

This is the Left, unvarnished, unfiltered by the MFM. These are Obama's natural allies. These are the ones who now call the Tea Party demonstrators racists and fascists, scary kooks and the American Taliban wanting to turn the US into a theocracy. They are the ones who did not get onto the pages of the Virginian Pilot, the NY Times or the Washington Post when Bush was president because they were an "inconvenient truth." They are the ones roaming the halls of congress and the White House today and the reason that the people are revolting at the ballot box.

We're not planning to kill anyone, even though they thought about killing us. We're just going to make them irrelevant; put them in a museum where people can look at them and and stare in wonder the these specimens ever took control in our country.

Microsoft Quashed Effort to Boost Online Privacy

From the Wall Street Journal:

In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.'s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.

That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft. As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet, Microsoft must balance conflicting interests: helping people surf the Web with its browser to keep their mouse clicks private, and helping advertisers who want to see those clicks.

In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.

I did not know this.