As you all know, Irreal doesn’t think very highly of journalists and the press. What Irreal likes even less is know-nothing politicos who nevertheless feel fully qualified to opine and pass judgment on technical matters. The Congressional hearings on social media companies are an excellent example of the phenomena.
Brian Krebbs provides us with a particularly egregious example. Suppose you’re the head of a large organization and that your organization’s Website embedded the social security numbers of over a hundred thousand of your employees in the site’s HTML. Suppose further that when an area newspaper informed you of this problem and held up their story on it until you could fix the problem, your response was to complain how much it would cost to fix the problem and to seek criminal prosecution of the reporter who worked on the story.
The story beggars the imagination and is made worse by the fact that the “large organization” is the State of Missouri and that its head is, of course, the Governor, Mike Parson. The level of cluelessness about how the Web works, what constitutes “hacking”, and the First Amendment to the US Constitution is astounding.
I have no idea about the politics of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—Media Bias/Fact Check says they’re left-center—but Parson is a Republican so it’s a reasonable suspicion that he and the Post-Dispatch have had an adversarial relationship. But even if the Post-Dispatch has been a thorn in Parson’s side—even if they’ve been unfair to him—that doesn’t justify his ridiculous reaction. If his staff doesn’t fill him in on reality, the courts surely will.
If you live in Missouri, you might have a few questions. Two such questions are:
- What kind of people do you have building the state’s websites? Why would anyone think it okay, safe, or secure to embed social security numbers in the HTML?
- How can it possibly cost 50 million dollars to fix this?
If you’re a Missouri resident, you can probably think of a few more questions.