White House, State Department, and USPS have sub-par cybersecurity

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The government may track your digital communications and store all sorts of data about you — but don't expect them to keep it safe. Internal federal reports have revealed that despite repeated threats from hackers at home and abroad, key federal agencies continue to maintain vulnerable web presences and all around lax cybersecurity.

Though this problem is serious, it is not new. The State Department, for example, has a backlog of 62 unaddressed security recommendations, about half of which are from 2013 or earlier. The internal reports suggest that some of the vulnerabilities could be eliminated if the agencies would simply perform regular system updates.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.