The government got hacked because its computers are too old to encrypt


The Los Angeles Times reports that the millions of files of federal workers' personal information that were allegedly compromised by Chinese hackers were vulnerable because the government is using wildly outdated computer technology.
"Some legacy systems may not be capable of being encrypted," explained Donna Seymour, chief technology officer for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The files that were hacked are old enough to legally drink, stored in systems which cannot be secured using modern encryption. As Seymour noted, "These problems are two decades in the making."
This whole vintage vibe should not be particularly surprising coming from our government, which is also still using programs from the 1960s to process our taxes.
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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.
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