It may be time to disconnect and move to the woods

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NEED TO KNOW:

The US government says hackers in China managed to gain access to the personnel information of about 4 million American government workers. The thieves got into databases belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, which handles employee records and — wait for it — security clearances.

It's hard to know much of anything beyond that. While the hack originated in China, US officials don't know whether the Chinese government is behind the attack or if some other group or individual is responsible. US officials said they discovered the hack in April, but it may have been active long before that.

Many US government agencies and offices are in the process of upgrading their digital security, which presumably involves more than just adding some uppercase letters to passwords. The Office of Personnel Management was in the middle of doing just that when the hack occurred.

The need to be more careful about this sort of thing has been repeatedly highlighted in the last year. This is the third major breach of government systems. In the first instance, hackers also accessed databases belonging to the personnel office, targeting workers who had applied for top secret security clearances. More recently, US officials said Russian hackers had broken into email systems belonging to the White House and State Department.

At least one US official has publicly blamed the Chinese government for this latest intrusion. Sen. Susan Collins, a republican from Maine, is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, so she may know something the rest of us don't. She told the Associated Press that this was “yet another indication of a foreign power probing successfully and focusing on what appears to be data that would identify people with security clearances.”

The Chinese government of course has denied such accusations, calling them irresponsible. Either way, there are now millions of people whose identities may have just been compromised. As hackers grow more and more sophisticated, governments and security agencies are scrambling to keep up. In the meantime, to be safe, it might be a good idea to cancel all your credit cards, empty your personal back accounts, shut down your social media accounts, and move to the woods.

WANT TO KNOW:

At this point, it seems like hackers around the world can more or less take what they want from the US government. Yet more of the focus from American legislators lately has been on laws that govern the ability of agencies like the NSA and the CIA to monitor Americans.

This week those legislators passed the USA Freedom Act, which reforms — to some degree — controversial provisions in the USA Patriot Act that allow domestic mass surveillance as a means to target potential terrorists. Those provisions had previously meant that spy agencies could collect huge amounts of our data and store it for years. If you ever visited a website or made a Facebook post that appeared sympathetic to a terrorist group, it could later be used to justify your targeting by police in a parking lot near Boston, for instance.

The Freedom Act somewhat limits that ability, and requires groups like the NSA to actually get court permission before listening in.

Another part of the new legislation allows prosecutors to seek up to 20-year prison terms — formerly the max was 15 — for anyone found guilty of giving “material support” to a terrorist group. However, as GlobalPost's Timothy McGrath writes, the definition of “material support” remains astonishingly vague. You could feasibly go to jail if a friend stayed at your house and borrowed your cellphone and then went to Pakistan to join Al Qaeda without your knowledge. This actually happened. 

In February 2015, a Justice Department official also said that "proliferating" pro-Islamic State content on Twitter and Facebook could be a crime under the "material support" ban. That means it's a little harder for the NSA to spy on you, but you could still go to jail (or worse) for tweeting the wrong thing.

STRANGE BUT TRUE:

An “expert panel” at the US Food and Drug Administration has given initial approval to a female version of Viagra, a pill originally intended to increase the sex drive of men. It's kind of amazing that we may now have a pill that increases the female sex drive, but we still — after all these years — don't have anything resembling a male birth control pill. Some might say that's because we live in a male-dominated society.

It's especially frustrating because in some parts of the world male birth control has been around for a long time. With just a little bit of effort (and desire), a male birth control pill could probably be reality. There is a plant, for instance, that grows in Indonesia. It's called “gandarusa.” And tribesmen in Papua have long known that if you chew the leaves often enough, your wife won't get pregnant.

Now an Indonesian researcher is synthesizing the properties of the gandarusa plant that appear to prevent pregnancy and putting it into pill form. He's been running tests that he says have been 99 percent effective. So the pill might actually work. But if it is ever going to be available in the United States, it will have to go through testing by the — yep — FDA. That could take a long time, a really long time.

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