Experts testified before a House committee on Tuesday that Obamacare’s website HealthCare.gov has about five times as many lines of code as do the social media giant Facebook and the new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system combined, a technological flaw that exposes Americans’ personal data to fraudsters and identity thieves.
Obamacare has more than 500 million lines of code, whereas Facebook reportedly has less than 20 million and Windows 8 has about 80 million–a total of about 100 million between the two.
“It has been widely reported that Healthcare.gov has over 500 million lines of computer code,” Morgan Wright, the CEO of IT security company Crowd Sourced Investigations, LLC, said in his written opening statement before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
He continued:
The number of daily unique visitors to the website since October 1, 2013 has trended down, reported to be no more than 500,000. Many visits resulted in a website that was not functional. In contrast, Facebook is reported to have less than 20 million lines of code with 727 million daily active users in September 2013. This is based on 1.2 billion monthly active users.
As such, Wright noted that such “complexities and interdependencies” of the website “create significant opportunities for disruption of service, compromise of the security and privacy of personally identifiable information (PII), frauds and scams and insider threats.”
“The vast amount of code also means applying industry-standard security practices, along with federally mandated Federal Information Management Security Information Act (FISMA) requirements, is a task that can have no real chance of success at present,” Wright testified.
Similarly, David Kennedy, the CEO of TrustedSEC LLC, testified before the committee that that many lines of code in Obamacare could prove to be the source of the site’s technological malfunctioning and security flaws.
“With the number of lines of code, this is one of the most complex applications ever written in the history of applications,” Kennedy said, according to his written testimony.
Kennedy said:
To put this in comparison, the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system, which is the latest, has an estimated 50 to 80 million lines of code and has over 25 years of development and maturity. It should be noted that with 80 million lines of code, the Windows operating system has had a significant amount of ‘exploits’ that have hit their product line since it’s early existence. Additionally, the Linux Kernel which runs the most popular open-source distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Redhat, etc. has roughly 15 million lines of code.
The chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), advocated in an op-ed Wednesday morning for Breitbart News that President Obama should scrap this website altogether and try to rebuild a different and new site. Smith argued that Obama should dispose of healthcare.gov’s current makeup since it would be easier and safer to prevent any security flaws from happening in the first place than try to catch and fix flaws after the fact.
“The massive amount of personal information collected by the Healthcare.gov website creates a tempting target for scam artists. Identity theft jeopardizes credit ratings and personal finances,” Smith wrote in the op-ed titled: “Mr. President, tear down this website.”
“These threats to Americans’ well-being and financial security should make us question the future of Obamacare,” Smith added. “Perhaps it is time to take Obamacare off of life support. Americans deserve a healthcare system that works and that they can trust.”
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