From: War on the Rocks
The theft of the SF-86 security clearance records of millions of current, former, and prospective U.S. government employees and contractors from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) probably has the Chinese government doing a happy dance. This data breach may affect up to 6 percent of the entire U.S. population. What use can the data be to China? Here are nine things that can now be done on an industrial scale.
1. Identify undercover officers. It is unclear if Chinese intelligence could have gained access to information about intelligence agency personnel through OPM. It may not matter much. Some particularly security-conscious agencies do no not process their clearances through OPM, but with a complete list of people whom the OPM has investigated, it is child’s play to identify people who work for those particularly interesting agencies. If the Chinese Ministry of State Security wants to know whether Jane Doe is a CIA officer, it can check whether she shows up in the OPM data. If not, she probably is. This is precisely why the State Department stopped publishing its Biographic Register of Foreign Service Officers in 1974.
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