Right, that is pretty much the point I make in my post at number 59…
We can start drilling down into various conspiracies and possible explanations that go one layer 2 layers or 10 layers deep… but the simple fact that our security apparatus has been completely watered down and destroyed to the point that it is insignificant is equally plausible as any of those conspiracy theories.
There are a lot of 22-year-old people who understand computers very well, how they are defended, and how to gain access to them. Government agencies including the military, State Department, and nearly anything else are enormous bureaucracies with thousands and thousands of people who have to go through background checks etc.
I think the mistake that a lot of people make is what they see in the movies, and they think our portals to sensitive intelligence archives is guarded in ways that would require you to rappel down from a heating vent through lasers and various layers of wondrous technologically advanced motion detectors that would set off alarms and send guys in black coveralls wielding automatic weapons causing the intruder to fall into a moat containing sharks with frikken laser beams attached to their heads where they would converge on him and destroy him.
I think the reality is far more prosaic… it’s just humongous computer systems holding enormous amounts of data that thousands or tens of thousands of people have access to to varying degrees. In the process by which people are granted access is completely worthless and full of holes.
Or maybe this kid simply blackmailed someone for access...
“...it’s just humongous computer systems holding enormous amounts of data that thousands or tens of thousands of people have access to to varying degrees. In the process by which people are granted access is completely worthless and full of holes.”
I think you’ve got a good point. I’m no hacker but I can work a lot of computer stuff. Back in the early 80’s (pre-Windows) I worked for a large soft drink company. They had a big main-frame accessible via modems to salesmen around the country (world?). Salesman asked me for an array of sales of new product, by size and container (glass plastic). They told him they couldn’t do that. He pressured me and I kept going back between other duties and got it just as you say: it’s a large system, just kept reformulating the question until I got the array he wanted.