Shane Harris reports:
Five years ago, U.S. officials refused to merge a database containing classified personnel records of intelligence agency employees with another run by the Office of Personnel Management, fearing that if the two systems were linked up, it could expose the personal information of covert operatives to leakers and hackers.
Those concerns look prescient now that the OPM, the government’s human resources department, has been overwhelmed by hackers who exploited the agency’s weak computer security and made off with huge amounts of personal information on millions of government employees and contractors. But that incident has also raised troubling questions about whether U.S. spy agencies actually heeded their own advice and have kept their records physically segregated from the OPM systems that were recently hacked, presumably by spies in China.
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