One of these days, our bumbling Administration is going to get sued for big bucks by identity theft or credit-card fraud victims who got robbed after they were forced to use a crapware website the government knows is unsafe and insecure. And when that lawsuit rolls, it will cite testimony such as the House heard from IT experts today. From the Washington Free Beacon:
A panel of IT experts had one answer for Congress when asked if Americans should use the Obamacare exchanges on Healthcare.gov in light of its security concerns: “No.”
A quartet of experts testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology cited numerous security flaws within Healthcare.gov. They attributed the risks to the complexity of its 500 million lines of code and a rushed rollout that failed to properly test the website.
Congress was warned that the personal information of everyone who uses TrainWreck.gov is at risk, “including Social Security numbers, birthdays, incomes, home mortgages, and addresses.” The IT experts actually demonstrated a hacker attack in the hearing room, musing that the highly organized and trained hacker teams in Russia and China would have a field day. And this insecure disaster of a website is patched into databases at the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security!
The situation is only going to get worse as the rushed, clumsy efforts to finish the ObamaCare system – which, we learned today, is only somewhere between 30 and 70 percent complete, and the guy in charge couldn’t nail it down any better than that – stumble forward. The Administration’s promised December 1 relaunch is right around the corner; a much harder, life-destroying deadline for processing completed payments to secure January 2014 coverage looms very soon after that. It’s nominally December 15, but in practice it’s probably more like five business days sooner, because it takes time for payments to post… and December 15 happens to fall on a Sunday this year, which is the worst possible day for the deadline to hit.
The security vulnerabilities will multiply with every line of code Obama’s A-team of coders changes, as they try to fix the steaming pile of incomplete garbage left by the B-team, which stumbled off into the sunset with $500 million of our money stuffed in their pockets. Will the revised and complete website receive security testing? Not a chance – that would take at least six months.
Clueless IT chief Henry Chao – the guy who claimed he was kept in the dark about ObamaCare’s endless series of half-assed failed tests by his own team – promised Congress today that the new stuff would be checked out “in the same exact manner we tested everything else,” which should have caused lightning flashes, spooky rolls of thunder, demonic laughter, and the theme song from “The Exorcist” to simultaneously erupt in the hearing room.
An argument could be made that ObamaCare is a threat to national security because of its vulnerabilities, and the treasure trove of secure data that hackers can find their way into, once they kick in the flimsy balsa wood front door of Healthcare.gov. It’s patently obvious that it’s a menace to everyone who uses it, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the already reluctant “young invincibles” aren’t going to go anywhere near the damn thing once the first identity-theft cases make the front pages.
This farce needs to end now. Congress should be holding an emergency session to repeal ObamaCare and pull the plug on its website. Instead of spending more millions of taxpayer dollars on hasty fixes, we should be trying to recover our money and holding Congressional investigations into how this disaster happened, with criminal charges filed as necessary.
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