I wondering how our FBI and AG know the Chinese military personnel information, by hacking I guess?
I found it very curious the William Barr first noted the financial damage to Equifax and then choked out the fact that data for 145 million individuals was stolen. Good luck if you think anyone will ever be held accountable.
Lol on data without consent. Every time you apply for a financial product you give your consent to credit monitoring. Don’t want it? Don’t borrow money.
If a certain building in Shanghai or Beijing is being used to attack the United States, doesn't that building deserve a few tons of high explosives delivered by our military, just as Tom Clancy included at the end of one of his novels?
War, commerce, and all information equate to the same thing in China or any area held by the gang who showed up with the most guns once, either recently or decades ago.
Perhaps China thinks its distance from its enemies wil protect it - like we thought before 9/11/2001.
This is a Titan War. The mere mortals below absorb the fallout from this ongoing conflict as business moguls try to get an advantage, calling it laissez faire capitalism. Did anybody ask AG Barr if the US government and corporations play the same crooked game? And who suffers? The deregulators busy themselves with creating a warped playing field. The public be darned.
As Peter Sellers remarked in the film "Doctor Strangelove" : “Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines.”
@Donald Green - - - Did you miss the part of the story where this was an attack mounted by the Chinese MILITARY?
No wonder some people keep losing elections....
This is one reason I support President Trump's tariffs on China.
6
Because???? The two things are unrelated. The tariffs have hurt American businesses, with the exception of the farm industry. We can’t afford to feed poor people, but we can afford billions to bail out farmers thanks the tariffs.
Equifax will pay $125 for the loss of data that is worth billions in the information market?!?! It just shows how clueless governments, law enforcement and regulators are about what is at stake.
Nothing will change until corporate executives are made personally responsible for their negligence. Placing a couple of Equifax executives in prison will be a great motivator for change. Other than that, nothing will happen.
4
It is very much worth asking if the US does things like this too. In fact, it's difficult to believe that the US doesn't, otherwise where are all the dollars spent on the intel community going? In the grand scale of things, countries spying on each other has been a fact for millennia. It's fair for the US to examine how went wrong in its defence systems, but let's not take any moral high grounds here. It's just business as usual.
2
The financial penalty imposed upon Equifax for not encrypting our information should significantly exceed its profit in managing the data, only then would the punishment have a deterrent affect.
3
Yes, indicting Chinese army officers will certainly help to contain Chinese cyber espionage. I'm sure the perpetrators are quaking in their boots. Not as flashy, but possibly more effective would be some effort by government agencies to assist US businesses in protecting digital assets. Prior to these break-ins did the government have any discussions about protecting the Equifax information if it's so valuable to our national security? If you leave the door open, you can't complain too loudly about the theft.
4
After doing everything in his power including lying and ignoring blatant crimes, Barr wants people to believe he’s back to enforcing the law. What a monumental joke! Does he think we have no short-term memory at all?
7
The moment we - in the US - also hold our own accountable with hefty fines or significant jail time for poor cyber security, inadequate oversight, and negligence, especially with companies who hold our data without our explicit permission, such data theft and breeches will stop.
4
Equifax get's the proverbial slap on the hand, and most of us will never see a dime of the money they promised us.
Billy Barr-Trump charges Chinese military members for hacking. So what good does that do the American people?
We're getting ripped off by both China and a multi-billion dollar American corporation right here at home.
Thanks for nothing.
4
It's good the Attorney General made a clear statement about the dangers of state sponsored cyber-attacks.
It's glaring the White House never bothered to make a public announcement announcing a select group of Russians had been formerly indicted (but also out of reach) for running a Putin sponsored troll-farm prior to the 2016 election.
Both cyber-attacks are dangerous, but only one gets incriminated by this administration. The Russian omission is galling and telling.
5
Welcome to statistics...
“But of the 147 million consumers affected, only a little more than 10 percent had filed for some type of compensation as of Dec. 1.”
This is the number one field of marketing to humans or taking advantage of humans; the so-called opt-out vs. opt-in. You get bombarded by this human technology every single day!
The system should be set up so you have to do absolutely nothing at all. The money should just show up on your account but that would tear down the system itself!
A sad day in paradise.
1
The article states the government notified Equifax prior to the hack, of a system vulnerability they uncovered. Equifax obviously took no action on that warning. damage to national security occurred. Should not the the decision of responsible executives at Equifax to flagrant ignore the warnings, be held criminally responsible?
4
They need someone with some credibility to make these kinds of statements. I don’t trust Barr to tell the truth about anything.
9
The right question is why are we not protecting ourselves? NSA and the CIA have all zero day exploits used to hack other nations that we should close to protect ourselves. In this case the best offense is a good defense. If we don’t protect ourselves we deserve to be hacked.
1
Equifax victim and Mandarin speaker here. How can I be of help in this debacle?
1
Need a good law firm to file a class action lawsuit against the Chinese government. Given that most chinese companies operating in America are chinese government owned, time to seize some assets
4
We invented this stuff, but we don't know how to secure it. Pathetic.
2
As soon as I saw Barr's name mentioned I immediately thought that this hacking wasn't done by the Chinese but by Americans.
2
The US govt. doesn't care. They fund war equipment
not US citizen personal security.
Protecting US taxpayers isn't deemed profitable by the
military industrial complex.
In fact, it's not hard to imagine given our present republican administration, that the Chinese were green lighted on
this project. In exchange for what? A hotel in Beijing?
Patents for Ivanka?
7
The fact that this comes from Barr makes me very skeptical. Why should anyone believe this isn't just another Trumpian smokescreen?
Somebody call Space Force!
4
Honestly, I can't trust Barr. This is likely just another lie from Trump's camp.
2
I'm baffled by many of the comments here. If a person is robbed or worse by walking through a bad neighborhood at night or going home with a questionable character we've all been taught not to blame the victim, and I agree. However, if 143 million are robbed by a hostile foreign power, we're blaming everyone but the theif?
5
@Owl
Well said.
Anything, ANYTHING, to divert attention from the disastrous governance that this administration is perpetrating on this country and the rest of the world.
Yes, hacking is or should be a crime. And yes, government hacking is doubly sinister but this is now three years ago and so far nothing has happened with my hacked equifax data.
Just another excuse to vilify the "other", the "other" being anyone who is not a U.S. Republican.
4
I don’t trust anything that comes out of Barr’s mouth. Maybe it was actually a Russian hack and they are just blaming China. Next week it will be Ukraine that really hacked us. Who knows what this administration will say next to serve their needs.
4
So make US companies financially responsible for theft or breaches of customer data they hold online. They'll outsource the risk to the insurers, Wall St will team up with the insurers and offer derivatives based on the risk, and the market will do its magic. Things will roll along as usual, until they don't. At some point, someone has to take responsibility. When you run your info economy like a casino and don't lock up your chips - in this case, information being money - don't be surprised when you're targeted for robbery
11
@expat did you just blame the victim?
Better idea is to kidnap these four, their extended families, their friends, and the families of their friends and do such horrific things to them in such a public manner that people think twice about following orders of this nature, until they don't.
1
@expat
They have to steal our information. While spying and hacking are fun and all, why don't the Chinese just start a tech company and buy our information legally? Everybody else is buying and selling our info.
This is an obvious diversion away from the fact that Republican backed corporations are keeping private personal Constitutionally protected information on all Americans, and that the Justice Department uses that information without regard for our rights. This is a Trumpian political propaganda piece by a corrupt Justice Department that views it's own people as the enemy by virtue of their conduct.
3
Many good points here. But one thing bugs me. I am sure both countries hack each others networks and spy on each other, remember even Israel spys on US? So why does the federal govt make this incident public? Is it to warn China? or to fan anti-China sentiment? NYT just published an article by Albright and Ivanov for reviving nuclear treaties. Seems Trump is determined to make everyone in the world our enemy, like a schoolyard bully would love to.
1
Today Barr very publicly announced that his department will accept the materials that the corrupt former prosecutor of Ukraine has just given Giuliani pertaining to the Bidens. Recall that Giuliani was in Ukraine procuring this material even as the Senate was failing to hold a proper trial for roughly the same kind of wrongdoing. Trump couldn't quite get Zelensky to make the slanderous announcement for them, cause the whistle-blower and other stalwarts of honesty, ethical governance and patriotism found out about their illegal scheme and spoke up. We are reminded of another little scheme, nestled inside the big one. This same corrupt former prosecutor promised he would give Trump dirt on the Bidens if Trump would fire our own genuinely anti-corruption Ambassador Yovanovitch. It was in furtherance of this sub-scheme that Giuliani and the gang spread lies about Yovanovitch, in order to justify firing her. Which of course they did. This whole thing is wrong in only about a million ways. It is wrong in most of the ways that the original Ukraine scheme was wrong and it is wrong in any number of new ways as well. For instance, Barr has initiated a politically motivated investigation of a political rival of his president. The public announcement in and of itself is an appalling abrogation of the vital DOJ tradition of independence and nonpartisanship. If impeachment is all we can do, then impeachment is by all means what we must do again. Chairman Schiff, please get started again.
5
@Robert
In short, the corrupt former Ukraine prosecutor has given sketchy documents pertaining to conspiracy theories about the Bidens to our not-my-president and his partisan sycophantic attorney general who has just this very day made a loud public announcement that the DOJ would consider it though it cannot be taken at face value. Because, as Barr puts it, he "has the obligation to have an open door to anybody who wishes to provide us information that they think is relevant." The pertinent longstanding DOJ policy is to never announce investigations let alone simple information gathering efforts. In other words, Barr's actions are in direct violation of longstanding DOJ policies.
3
Still absolutely NOTHING on the Russians though. Trump's friends can pillage all they want, as long as they send it back through campaign help.
4
While Trump wastes tax dollars on a ridiculous "space force" and a border wall, cybersecurity gets short shrift.
3
Stop letting the Chinese infiltrate our universities and our country.
7
Seriously? That’s your solution, to add all the Chinese to all the mainly Muslim countries on a Not Welcome In The USA List? That is aclow-tech and inefficient and Anti-American solution to a complex issue.
1
This begs a question - and its a big one: what exactly are we going to do about it? Wait for the defendants to travel to the US and appear in federal court?
Nobody is discussing the rules of engagement for cyber warfare. If China sunk one of our ships or the Russians bombed one of our installations, we would know exactly what to do. What about these attacks?
Here is a modest proposal. In our society, if a person misuses something, we take it away from them. Drive 150 mph? Lose your drivers license. Serve tainted food at a restaurant? They shut you down. At the moment, technology is on our side. We can seize routes to the malefactors’ address blocks. We can delete their DNS records. This would effectively disable their internet access or severely impair it. Last year, the Russians, anticipating such a measure, performed a drill in which they isolated their DNS information. It failed miserably - and that was probably the easier of the measures to implement.
We can scale the countermeasure both in scope and duration. The important thing is that potential attackers know that there is always a consequence.
3
Who can believe anything the Trump justice department says? Barr has no credibility.
4
But we “allow” these companies to dictate our credit worthiness? How can they have have any legitimacy? And the company’s ...”difficulty in protecting against state agents” ? Give me a break. How many breaches have there been? Seems the companies can’t protect us, their clients, against any agents. Because they just do not care.
1
We're charging 4 Chinese guys? We should be charging CHINA. China is NOT our friend so why do we send all our manufacturing and money there? Because money. China gives us cheap labor and pretends to be our friend and we ignore all their espionage, from nuclear and military secrets to citizens' personal information. We need to redirect our trade OUT of China and stop pretending they like us. They don't.
8
Of course the Chinese are stealing US data - just as the NRA is stealing the data of foreigners, tap the phones of friendly leaders such as Angela Merkel (under Barack Obama!!!), and engage in systematic industrial espionage against foreign companies to aid their US competitors.
This is why none in Europe buys the campaign against Huawei, because the Americans are no better than the Chinese (or the Russians) when it comes to cyber espionage. And no, that's not Snowden's propaganda. Just talk to a European businessman or politician, and they will tell you the same thing.
3
Is this the same Bill Barr, the one who is wasting taxpayer money to run his own bogus investigation, catering to the Vladimir Putin instigated deliberate disinformation spread by Donald "I'll get my Towers in St. Petersburg and Moscow yet" Trump, to try to prove that it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, as declared in the unanimous opinion of all US intelligence agencies, who hacked the 2016 elections?
The gall, the smarminess of this toadie.
Why should we believe him now?
And watch, now that Trump has been acquitted - by the likes of Senator Lindsey "I never advocated a principle that I wasn't willing to throw under the bus in a crunch to stay 'relevant'" Graham - the Barr investigation will quietly disappear.
To save Barr the embarrassment of having to publicly explain why it was ordered simply as a vengeance and diversionary tactic by Trump in the first place.
I certainly hope people like Barr don't have children to whom they try to explain and justify their behavior.
3
Same as China the US has hacked all over globe and overthrown governments. We still keep buying cheap landfill items and make one dumb joint business venture after another with the Chinese. We cannot even manufacture a simple dishwasher.
What bothers me most is that leadership at the helm in this case Equifax (Richard Smith) still walk away with $90mil. in compensation. Companies like Equifax and the likes serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever and I never gave them permission to access my information.
Good luck with running a service based economy, you only can sell empty boxes so long.
2
As long as Trump children are getting parents in China, the administration will play softball on this and other issues.
4
“Months before the attack, the government warned Equifax that its network contained a vulnerability, but the company did not patch it, according to government documents. The hacking was “entirely preventable,” a congressional study concluded in 2018.
...
The hackers’ encryption of their operations inside Equifax’s networks is a common technique and has raised new questions about why such sensitive data in American databases is not legally required to be encrypted, experts noted. Many companies have resisted such regulation, in part because encrypted data can be harder for them to search.
...
The outcry from consumers and lawmakers after the breach and the company’s clumsy response was strong: Equifax and its executives were chastised and the company eventually settled with regulators for up to $700 million.
But just more than 10 percent of the 147 million consumers affected had filed for some type of compensation as of Dec. 1.
Of those, more than 4.5 million had filed claims for a cash payment of up to $125, one of the settlement options. But the company set aside only $31 million for the cash option, which works out to less than $7 a person.”
So they settled for up to 700M of which 37M might be in cash. Five percent. So what about the rest? Their peerless services no doubt.
So if you are not a big corporation, even when you win you lose. You always lose. That’s how your Justice department works.
3
@Paul Easton
You think $700M settlement is a loss? Try being a Canadian who was affected.
How much do you think they got for this hack? ZERO. Not even a court case to pretend there was a settlement.
How much for the much bigger medical lab records hack that affected one third of the population? Again ZERO.
1
So were is the punishment for Equifax ? They failed to protect their data with even most basic security; and they are not alone. Now millions of Americans have their data out their for sale/export. And Equifax: They continue to promote and even (and this is real chutzpah) sell 'security' monitoring products to consumers.
5
I fear the Trump government far more than the Communists in China. The Communists execute their corrupt officials. Trump elevates his and encourages others to be corrupt.
4
The Chinese are certainly going to steal our technology.
But I am confident that they will be thwarted. I have been to China a number of times and seen how they have duplicated western technology.
But that is the key. They copy, including even the imperfections of a design. They will make an exact duplicate, sometimes they may even tweak an improvement, but what have they invented in the last 100 years?
Not much.
We should protect our intellectual property, but even if they steal it, so far, we have been ahead of them and still are. Why?
They are a copycat culture that does not encourage innovation. They are too concerned about appearances, the Corona Virus is a case in point.
6
If y'all haven't locked down your credit agency accounts (Equifax, Transunion, Experian) you're basically bait for any fraudster shark out there. Don't wait, like I did, for your IRS taxes to be hacked. The good thing about locking down your credit reports is that any fraudster with a scheme has to get a recent credit history. So even if China stole your information (and many others as well) they still need to use that information to get a recent credit check so as to get a fraudulent credit card or mortgage. It's a hassle but it's really the only meaningful defense, nearly as I can see.
It's nice to see Bill Barr interested in prosecuting someone other than Trump's domestic political enemies. Let's hope it becomes a habit.
1
This horrifying incident is but one small example of why computers should not be involved at all in the most basic of our practices of democracy, i.e., voting for elected representatives.
When we all know how electronic things, right down to the smartphones with which we are so intimate, behave unreliably, why aren't more Americans completely convinced that restoring paper ballots and mechanical voting machines are absolutely critical to preserving American freedom?
I disagree. Many of our problems that we blame on technology are really just a consequence of the volume of information we are forced to deal with. Throwing up our hands and saying we are powerless to control our own technology is not helpful. In fact, it is how we wound up in this predicament in the first place. We trusted the manufacturers to upload the data from their machines and count the votes for us. There is no excuse for that, especially when the vendors had notorious track records, and, in some cases, explicitly stated political leanings.
Paper ballots can be lost, destroyed, and forged. Electronically-cast votes, if done properly, are immune to those things. Just as bad, government agencies are very reluctant to order recounts due to the time and effort involved. In the Florida presidential election of 2000, do you think the courts would have even hesitated if the recount would have taken a few minutes (or less) to complete.
It seems to me that the solution lies in use of only open-source voting machines of an approved generic design, combined with certificate voting, where all votes are published in anonymous form, and each voter is able to prove to himself/herself that the vote they cast is in the list, using information provided only to them at the time of voting. The public vote list would carry enough information to allow it to be correlated to precinct/time period totals except in cases where turnout is so light that it could compromise anonymity.
Quote: "Equifax and its executives were chastised and the company eventually settled with regulators for up to $700 million.
"...more than 4.5 million [customers] had filed claims for a cash payment of up to $125... But the company set aside only $31 million for the cash option, which works out to less than $7 a person."
So the U.S. government received $700MM, and the persons affected have been offered compensation of .0000001% of what the government received.
There are hardly words to characterize this inequity. "It makes no sense" hardly captures the truth.
1
Read the details. Both DoJ and the company want to inflate the headline number, but actual cash? Always lower. “Settlements” make the government look good, but don’t work to deter corporate negligence and misbehavior. Until the DoJ and other regulators drop the charade of settlements that only hurt shareholders, and begin civil and criminal actions against individual executives, will corporate behavior change. The government always argues that it’s too hard to get a conviction, but who cares? The mere threat of prosecution will serve as a far better deterrent. One possible explanation for the DoJ and SEC’s reluctance to prosecute is the revolving door between government and the lucrative private sector defense practice. Far better to settle and keep the gravy train moving.
Another example of why we so desperately need to replace to ssn system we have to uniquely identify a person in this country. It baffles me how we keep bandaging this year after year.
1
Wonderful. I used to make and have a whole lot of money; along with a credit rating to die for. Now I make 1/20th of what I less than 5 years ago. Therefore, I really don't care. Besides, America probably has what the Chinese have anyway; plus many other people in many other countries.
So, for some reason it's ok to hack an election in order to install a fascist dictator in power against the will of the majority of voters, but it's not ok to hack the great judge of people's worth to banks, Equifax? Nothing like hypocrisy to make one disgusted by their fraudulent government.
1
Made in China.
1
China can never be trusted to honor its agreements, and that's especially true when we have no effective way to monitor their compliance. China cheats and lies because it can; because the costs of doing so do not exceed the benefits. We therefore need to increase the costs, which should include sanctions. It's time to start treating China as the enemy that it is.
5
Are we to believe that China steals information but we don't? Wait till I stop laughing.
@JGSD Once you finish laughing, you may want to start believing, and distinguish between cyber ops that target foreign state actors vs. private entities during peacetime.
4
Didn’t we just randomly kill Iran’s general w/o being at war?
If Barr weren't so deep in Trump's pocket he'd be looking at Russian election interference then ('16) and soon ('20).
3
There are 300 million Americans total. Getting data on 145 million Americans with credit history is basically everyone.
The connection at Equifax had to be open and moving data for quite a while without notice.
2
Vow! 1.4 billion spies from China? We have 300,000 plus Chinese students now studying in America. What are we going to do with them? We don't have that many agents in FBI and CIA.
3
Love this quote from Mr. Demers of the Justice Department:
“China sees economic interests and intelligence interests as one and the same,” he said. “Commercial benefits are national security benefits in China.”
Sounds like the pot (i.e. the administration's "national security" justification for tariffs) calling the kettle black.
1
How come the feds would not see to it that the vulnerability was solved without question back in 2017? Why is Equifax allowed to be merely warned if an attack could theoretically bring down our country? Why does Equifax get to access all our credit information without our consent to begin with? We are evaluated for jobs, mortgages and other life changing events by this institution-all without our consent. Or is this announcement all anti China propaganda to help with Trump's re-election? This whole situation stinks!
2
I think it is good the Chinese spy on the US and the US on China. It makes a safer world.
it makes trump or Xi less confident in their ability to cook up dangerous/stupid plans in secret, like nuke the other first.
So Equifax left the back door open?
1
@northlander
Yup.
Why is Barr not going after Russia for their election interference, and protecting us from far worse election interference this year?
Instead, he's flying across the world trying to pressure our allies to recant on the intelligence they gave us about Russia's interference, thereby undermining our own intelligence services.
This is absolutely despicable and un-American. Barr is every bit as bad as Trump, and needs to be investigated the second the Democratic nominee gets sworn in as our nhext President.
3
I’m not a Barr fan, but Mueller already secured indictments for the Russian hackers.
2
it would be interesting to know, what, if any ,US or Chinese laws the US government have to break/side step to collect all the information reported here.
are they going to find the Russians who are freezing files and networks for ransom, or is Russia off limits as a friend-of-trump?
1
This is no reason why Equifax should survive. They knew their system was vulnerable, but they didn't bother to install a patch. "Mistakes were made" is no excuse. Liquidate them today!
4
Stealing is China's modus operendi for getting ahead.
6
The Equifax breach was in 2017. At the time, it was widely reported that China was involved
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4937010/Clues-suggest-China-suspect-massive-Equifax-hack.html
Of course, in 2018 there was an indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence operatives for hacking into the DNC in 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html
Trump and Barr don’t believe in the Russian hacking, and have not pursued this to trial.
So why go after China now? The timing is deeply suspicious, and may be designed to divert attention from something else big. We should not be fooled by Barr’s shell game.
3
@AKJersey Only in "Democratic Socialist" countries do you have trials where the defendants are not present
3
Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating more than 1000 cases of Chinese theft of US technology:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-is-investigating-more-than-1000-cases-of-chinese-theft-of-us-technology/
Many people don’t realize how the pipeline works. Universities recruit Chinese students in order to provide a complacent workforce to US companies via OPT, where Chinese enclaves abound. Once on H1 or a green card, they go to Chinese companies in the US taking IP theft with them. Companies like Alibaba, Huawei, etc. And they routinely travel between the two countries on “business”. By this time, they usually have a few children who are US citizens.
The solution is very simple. Eliminate OPT and birthright citizenship.
5
Every time you buy Chinese products, you support these efforts. Whenever you have a choice, buy from somewhere else.
8
Maybe we should do a quick poll to see what everyone thinks about this. Do we prefer greater funding for cyber security or the new (mission-to-be-defined) space force?
And, by the way, we shouldn't forget that Trump called Mr. Xi a great friend. But, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
3
Are we to trust William Barr on this? No. This is just Barr carrying out Trump's foreign policy.
4
The timing on this suspect and I don't trust Barr. Why all this now? How long have they known about this? Smells like distraction from Russian election interference/conflicts of interest. And this utter insanity: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-impeachment-russia-putin-vladimir-zhirinovsky-ldpr-mar-a-lago-twitter-a9324716.html
3
Once the Chinese open my hacked medical records maybe they can tell me what’s wrong with me, like they even know what’s wrong with their own people. Why does all this cyber nonsense remind me of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
The main issue is not that the Chinese hacked into government and corporate databases with the latter's negligent complicity. Rather, it is why we, the American people, have entrusted all this information to the internet. Yes, it is us, not the government that is at fault, though had we had real leadership these past few decades, we might have spared ourselves web dependency and addiction.
Countries are going to spy, corporations will pretend they are secure and have your interest at heart, politicians will rarely lead, and the large majority of people will self-delude for the sake of convenience, gossip, and their daily fix of electronically induced endorphins.
There is no privacy or security on the internet nor can there ever be, and as much as we hate to admit it, the bad guys (however you choose to define them) are as smart as the good guys and are often more motivated.
The other question this article begs is why there is no enforcement mechanism when security vulnerabilities are discovered. If Experian was informed of the problem two months before the attack, why do we not have the legal means to force closure of the vulnerability? (That's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.) Why are the individuals who made the decisions to allow the exposure of your personal info not subject to criminal penalties? Why are corporations allowed to simply consider fines a cost of doing business? (Another rhetorical question.)
Most important: when will people say, "Enough!"
3
Sounds like the wall that Trump should be talking about exists in the ether and not on the southern border. Who'd a thunk?
When our current leadership needs solutions to these types of problems, like all those that they have denied or ignored (e.g. cyberattacks, coronavirus, pollution remediation), who are they going to look to for answers? College educated "liberal elite" PhDs trained in chemistry, biology, physics, computer science, etc. I'm thinking. With Trump though, who knows? He/they might be more likely to say the threat doesn't exist...
This is all Donald Trump's fault.
Instead of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of our republic Donald Trump is overtly colluding with Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel, Vladimir Putin and Russia and Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia.
And Trump is either covertly working with the Chinese and the North Koreans or he is their top useful American asset and idiot.
Trump has spent a third of his time in office golfing and vacationing at Trump Organization properties. Trump has spent two thirds of his time in office tweeting and speaking nicknames and slurs while watching Fox News.
Along with being the laziest American President Donald Trump is also the most ignorant, immature, immoral, incompetent, inexperienced, intemperate and insecure American President ever.
4
@Blackmamba
When I read the first sentence of this post, I thought it was just another rant. Then I read further and thought it was a pretty good rant. Then I finished it, thought about it and now I think it's not only the best darn rant I've read today, but a spot-on, succinct, analysis of the current administration.
2
And why, we wonder, have no comparable gotcha moments been captured by our government when it comes to Russia?
I guess Trump didn't "fall in love" with the Chinese leader. Had he done so, Barr would never have spoken as he did.
This government--and I am talking about OUR government--needs to be replaced ASAP.
2
I guess the Chinese did not give Ivanka enough trademarks - so, now they are in trouble. Does anyone believe that anything this administration does is not part of a quid pro quo?
3
@AKJ Maybe you didn't read the article. This happened under Comey's and McCabe's watch in early 2017 while those two crooks were too busy illegally "wiretapping" Americans without cause
2
Sounds like a huge deal if the Chinese military carried out the attack.
2
I'm all for this, but it's a bit hollow when corporations lobby heavily against privacy protections and our intelligence agencies want built-in backdoors to our electronic devices. It's like saying "feel good, citizen, that only your American overlords will own your identity."
2
Did it really take over 2 years to identify 4 Chinese operatives?
My guess, of course, is that these 4 were "negotiated" to become the "bad actors". There appears to be way too much actual cooperation between our "justice" department, especially under the highly suspect Barr (tell us again about the Epstein murder, and why the former warden was promoted!), to accept this explanation as the whole story.
This brings us again to Snowden's revelations. Although the DOJ is separate from our intel agencies, it seems hard to believe "we" weren't aware of the Chinese hackers early on.
@Slann Did you read the article. This happened under McCabe and Comey
But it could be a 400 pound guy sitting on his bed.
Or Crowdstrike.
or Hillary.
1
Totally. How can we ever know?
“Xi told me, so I have no reason to not believe him... we had a very beautiful, open conversation, with so many wonderful words exchanged... through a translator... but he was very clear that it was not the Chinese... so I have no reason to not believe him...”
3 months later Rudy is in Mongolia.
LOL so weird to see Barr pretending to do the job of AG for a change. I'm surprised he could find the time to squeeze in a little real AG work considering his primary responsibilities include inventing with new cover-ups for his crime-boss president, finding creative ways to dismiss lengthy, incriminating investigations, taking sweaty phone calls with "tips" from Rudy Giuliani, and jetting around the world on our dime trying to drum up some dirt on the crime-boss's real or perceived enemies. Oh, not to mention giving wacko, fascist-friendly speeches to the Federalist Society. Guy's got a lot on his plate.
1
I think by the time this decade is over the GOP will start blaming everything bad about tech on Al Gore, saying that it is he who really invented the internet. Heads they win. Tails you lose.
At least in the case of Equifax, all of this information is readily available on the internet because we want instant credit, and more importantly there are a lot of people that really want to lend us money at a high interest rate.
Are we willing to wait two days for a credit application to process as a trade off for better security?
Equifax may be ‘based in Atlanta’ but it’s operations and customer service people are in India and the Philippines. American’s private data is entrusted to low wage workers in third world countries with out robust rule of law. I’m not surprised I’m the least by this hack, Equifax is a train wreck of a company.
3
Barr went on to say “You are getting sleepy, very sleepy. Concentrate on the shiny object. Forget everything you ever heard about Russia and Ukraine. When you awake you will be able to think of nothing but China”
Equifax management should be charged for letting this happen. Why are they not?
2
It would be naive to assume that the U.S. does not have the capacity, the willingness, motivation and is actually engaged in cyber attacks in a major way. The Chinese and others are sending a strong message that they can now play this game.
Given the extensive business interests that Ivanka has in China, I doubt the administration will really pursue this.
This is all for show from Barr. He’s a hack who has shown that he doesn’t represent interests of the American people. Instead, he’s a personal attorney for Trump and his greedy children.
Equifax is trying to snake their way out of paying any Americans affected from the settlement. They do not want to pay unless the victim has credit protection in place. Too late for that, pay up Equifax. Typical corporate greed.
1
News flash, Trump Administration charged with buying location data of every American from third party apps to track and use as a go around from the ruling by Supreme Court denying access to those records and tracking directly from the ISPs and big Tech companies!
Meanwhile they charge the Chinese hackers.... while they subvert the law as well. No it's not OK for any hacker to do this and no it's not OK for the govt to do what they do either.
When will people wake up to the abuse of everyone's data?
The "justice" department under Barr is just another arm of the corrupt Presidency right now.
2
The Chinese Communist Party is a serious threat to the free world and its time to start fighting back.
2
Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating more than 1000 cases of Chinese theft of US technology:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-is-investigating-more-than-1000-cases-of-chinese-theft-of-us-technology/
Many people don’t realize how the pipeline works. Universities recruit Chinese students in order to provide a complacent workforce to US companies via OPT, where Chinese enclaves abound. Once on H1 or a green card, they go to Chinese companies in the US taking IP theft with them. Companies like Alibaba, Huawei, etc. And they routinely travel between the two countries on “business”. By this time, they usually have a few children who are US citizens.
The solution is very simple. Eliminate OPT and birthright citizenship.
5
According to Trump, they're just digital entrepreneurs.
2
Nothing in China happens without the approval of the Chinese Communist Party.
We have let them get away with murder because they control so much of our economy.
Now, with all these revelations as well as the corona virus destroying China, it is time to cut free from them.
Let them fall to pieces if they love Communism so much.
4
Right now foreign financial institutions are badgering American citizens abroad for their US Social Security numbers. Not only is the US doing nothing to stop this, this is with the full blessing of the US Treasury Department. One of my banks asked me to fill out a form by EMAIL! Seriously. That went in the trash bin. It is up to us to
protect our own data. The US has no control over foreign data breeches either, yet they are deliberately and willfully puting
US citizens up for grabs.
These are the times I wish we had an unmoored President who gratuitously threatened violence or nuclear warfare without measuring every word to put a scare into the Chinese Government... Hey wait!!
1
Nice to see Barr doing real work though.
Yes, we need encryption laws to protect us as a start. In the meantime, why are you still on Facebook?
1
Does Equifax have a credit score?
If so, I can't imagine it being anything more than, say.....30 !!
The Chinese government continues to show zero ethics or morals and no restraint toward foreign partners or even Chinese citizens.
4
Since Atty General Barr dutifully made the announcement, I was wondering if Hunter Biden was indicted ….
1
Barr is the boy who cried wolf and I don’t know how anyone can believe a single thing he says at this point. Good or bad, his word is MUD.
2
Cutoff your nose to spite your face. Barr was right on the other stuff too.
1
@DM
It is amazing - nobody asks for any hard data, just believe whatever feels good. Smells of orchestrated propaganda. People are easy marks.
China "reimbursed" the US for its evil doing by granting Princess Ivanka dozens of trademarks. Even-Steven; Trump is happy.
3
Yes go after China well and good but what of all of us who were affected by Equifax's negligence? A free year of identity theft insurance and then we have to pay for it. The government does nothing for us and nothing to Equifax. There had to be a lawsuit to get a settlement of on average a measly $200 or so. Big farmers were given millions to compensate for tariffs against China and the average American gets nothing from this breach and the clear message is that there is no fallout or prosecution of big business. I got around this problem by locking my credit but for the majority of people this is not a viable option. Again when will Republicans ever make big corporations, banks, credit agencies responsible for anything?
8
This are serious accusations with huge implications. What a pity that we don't have a government that we can believe. U.S. politics has become a fever dream.
Cybersecurity is too complex and arcane for the government to exhibit the kind of leadership we need to define real digital solutions. How could we expect government "innovation" here, in front of the backdrop of other headline issues like healthcare, climate change, and political parties generally shouting. Even in private industry, where cybersecurity's importance is increasingly recognized, progress is slow due to its complexity and the need for secrecy. Shareholders cannot punish corporations guilty of cyber-negligence because "everyone does it" and really they don't understand it.
Cyberwar is like the cold war of the last century, with growing numbers of domestic "casualties." We can already see that the US will not retaliate in the physical world when digitally wounded. I can only assume the US is doing covert hacking of its own, proactively and/or in retaliation, but we don't see articles about it.
Nixon should never have gone to China.
3
The main issue is not that the Chinese hacked into American and corporate databases. Rather, it is why we, the American people, have entrusted all this information to the internet. And yes, it is us, not the government that is at fault, though had we had real leadership these past few decades, we might have spared ourselves web dependency and addiction.
Countries are going to spy, corporations will pretend they are secure and have your interest at heart, politicians will rarely lead, and the large majority of people will self-delude for the sake of convenience, gossip, and their daily fix of electronically induced endorphins.
There is no privacy or security on the internet nor can there ever be, and as much as we hate to admit it, the bad guys (however you choose to define them) are as smart as the good guys and are often more motivated.
The other question this article begs is why there is no enforcement mechanism when security vulnerabilities are discovered. If Experian was informed of the problem two months before the attack, why do we not have the legal means to force closure of the vulnerability? (That's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.) Why are the individuals who made the decisions to allow the exposure of your personal info not subject to criminal penalties? Why are corporations allowed to simply consider fines a cost of doing business? (Another rhetorical question.) Most importantly, when will people say, "Enough!"
4
The IRS and SSA should be the most well-funded branch of government, not DOD. That’s where the threat is and where the criminals are looking.
6
I hope Trump’s and Barr’s data are in there.
4
Cyberwarfare goes both ways for years. As a reader, I would like to read how the US has responded to the threat by hacking into Chinese military security or commercial useful data from China or this is too sensitive for the NYt to digging into the black hole of national security?
1
Hey, potus, thanks for nothing! I feel safer!!
1
Done in 2017. Did our President promise to stand up for America against China? It turns out the Chinese knew that was a con. 145 million Americans had their personal information stolen and Trump just rolled over. Talk tough, do nothing.
13
@Baldwin
Meanwhile, in 2014 and 2015 when the government HR files of a million government employees (especially those working in intelligence) was hacked by the Chinese, the Obama administration did nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach
It resulted in the largest intelligence loss since the Cold War. Nary a peep or investigation was held. Holder didn't even bother to press charges. Even after it happened twice.
2
This is serious beyond pale. China can now drain the bank accounts, ruin the credit of one half the US. The US needs to retaliate and the major credit bureaus need to be shuttered immediately.
5
When Equifax was warned that their system was vulnerable, why in the world did they not immediately patch it? And not only did they not act quickly, they ignored the warning and let it slide for months.
This gross negligence is utterly inexcusable. At a minimum, why were they not REQUIRED to act immediately and prove that they had done so?
The US needs a top to bottom overhaul of privacy protections.
11
I've worked in China for 25 years. I never buy products made by China owned businesses. I have to design and manufacture products here in the U.S. and sell those products in China, where the government literally pays indigenous businesses to copy and compete with my products there and abroad. Nobody in America who buys a cheap shirt from Walmart, or a child's toy from Target, or LED Christmas lights from Home Depot know, or care to know, they are investing in the steady decline of American enterprise. Hey! Our government says consumer confidence is riding high! Whose hair do we have set on fire to get people mobilized to protect and defend our country and our culture from this economic cold war with an authoritarian and hostile regime?
18
I hear your pain. But - why is there not a HUGE difference in price of a China-made vs US-made mens shirt? The middleman is taking all the margin.
2
So does this mean the trade war is back on full force?
1
The federal government should issue new SS numbers to all citizens and roll out a program to severely restrict how companies and other organizations are allowed to collect and use them in the future. Or better yet, get rid of SS numbers altogether and implement some sort of dynamic password technology, that requires the password holder and password seeker to consent to an exhchange of information in real time, maybe verified by thumbprint? I don't know this space well enough to say, but the idea of a single number, more often than not in print or residing in hundreds of databases somewhere hardly seems like an honest attempt by our government to safeguard our privacy.
4
@Father of One Please.....don't think this Administration or this DOJ needs to get involved with anything called "SS!"
1
Since much of what Attorney General, William Barr, does involves tilting the system to provide Donald Trump with a political edge against Trump’s opponents and critics, a majority of Americans are suspicious of Bill Barr’s motives in any undertaking.
This latest news, however, of the aggressive action by Bill Barr against the Chinese military hackers of Equifax has -- at least on the surface – an appearance of urgency and legitimacy.
We owe it to ourselves and to the nation to give Barr the benefit of the doubt for now. The fact that F.B.I. Director, Christopher Wray, is on board about the sanctions is persuasive, since Wray has a reputation for non-partisan honesty – unlike the Attorney General.
2
The greatest strength that impacts everything China does is its perspective borne of longevity. China knows they have the time to slowly pick away at the rest of the world’s political and economic weaknesses. Long term planning combined with China’s theft/purchase of new technology to say nothing of their massive investments in international raw resources is paving their way to world dominance. They are not out to win friends they are out to own them.
3
Just like the colonial Europeans did in the 15-16-17-18-19th centuries. And US has for the last 200 years with military not occupation.
You can't have old fashioned 'freedoms' in this day and age. At the same time, no one trusts the current government to put proper locks on our info. Its time to put some of these guys in jail, no matter which country they are from or hiding in.
3
Well Mr. President, I'm waiting for you to show strength and anger. Against Xi. Against China. Let's go Trump, start bombing. Tough guy.
Hmmm interesting. Seems that the US is moving more and more towards holding individuals accountable for working against American interests, even if they do so under the auspices of another State. I wonder if the world will follow suit. It seems, right off the bat, that some American officials might be vulnerable to war crime charges.
1
To those who were against the Trump tariffs: Why should we allow China to engage in these kinds of thefts?
And don't tell me that tariffs are a disaster for our economy. That theory has already been disproven, along with other predictions that taking just actions in the world will cause disaster. (Remember the predictions after Suleimani's killing?)
China remains our most potent and dangerous rival.
34
@Unconventional Liberal
"China remains our most potent and dangerous rival."
Absolutely correct but, you fight criminal activity with tariffs? They keep doing as they have been and we (willingly, it seems) pay more for goods from China? From the mind of a stable genius.
6
@Unconventional Liberal
Ha! How many billions of taxpayers hard-earned income has been handed out to corporate farmers because of the tariffs?
6
@Unconventional Liberal
so who pays the tarifs? its not the Chinese, its American farmers and manufacturers. Wake up man, tarifs do no good, just good sound bites.
8
Tip of an iceberg.
Why would a credit reporting company like Equifax handle medical information? If true, they are required to manage that data under the Federal HIPPA regulations. According to the article: "...data that can be used to access information like medical histories..."
A medical informatics database is designed to identify each and every person who enters or views the database. Every one. But according to the article: "For the most part, they managed to erase their tracks inside of the Equifax network"
Perhaps the Feds ought to be turning the screws to Equifax, too. Personally, I'm getting tired of everybody demanding access to my medical records, and then squandering them with their light and casual attitude toward my personal data.
2
The caption of your photo at the top of this article reads, “Hackers stole names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of millions of Americans through an attack on Equifax in 2017.”
What it should say is this:
“China stole names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of millions of Americans through an attack on Equifax in 2017.”
You’re welcome.
4
How about they arrest the four top executives at Equifax for stupidity and negligence?
9
This might be part of trying to get a good "deal", I hear it is an"Art". China should have agreed to more branding and a dedicated shipping channel to the US via Mitch's wife's family.
2
What's the point of indicting senior Chinese military intelligence officials? In case those individuals visit 'neutral' third countries prepared to arrest and extradite them to the US?
So... presumably China will reply in kind. And what then has been achieved?
The truth is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did nothing to address the Equifax breach. Mulvaney took over the agency, and basically defunded it. Not a dime to go toward prosecuting Equifax and the breach of most of Americans with a credit history. The fact that the credit agencies can collect our most precious data and determine our credit, our most protected personal information and allow our identities to be stolen, our assets stolen, is outrageous. To have to pay to get your credit report more than once a year, fight the company to make corrections to your own information, and that you can be denied a loan, mortgage, or credit card on the basis of their scoring system is criminal.
The CFPB let this country down. The timing of blaming the Chinese is interesting. How convenient to release this news now, but to have done nothing to protect the American people from this breach in 2016 when it happened. Not to mention the way Equifax handled the breach, giving out time and date stamps that were hackable to freeze credit reports, websites crashing.....An American disaster in Consumer protections, which will only get worse under this administration......The next housing crash, financial crash is around the corner, and no one in the Trump administration will have America's back.
4
China has made itself our enemy through China’s own actions. We must respond accordingly and not be swayed by attempts to simultaneously promote American good will toward this same brutal dictatorship of China which, through its own actions, has declared that we are at war.
5
How is this not an act of war?
5
@JDK If spying is an act of war, we, the United States, have pretty much declared war on everyone, allies included. That's how.
3
We don’t expose private information to criminals to harm individual people.
4
@Lilly What criminals did the Chinese expose the private info to and what individuals were harmed? Unless you are talking about exposing American spies. While that is not great for us, every country tries to id those spying on them.
Equifax (who gets our credit information FREE without our consent) left the barn door wide open. Then they tried to hide it. Once it came out that half of all American's credit files were leaked, they got the TrumpGOP Congress to exchange their legal liability to forced arbitration for anyone hurt or ruined financially due to Equifax' negligence.
3
China will continue to play dirty and for the long game. Anyone who has spent any time in large Asian cities, particularly China’s, sees first hand the undercurrent of oppression, forced labor, desperation... regardless of how bustling and prosperous the middle class and elite appear. An admonishment from an American, a stranger to me, 30 years ago when I was an early arrival to a Chinese vacation locale: “The Chinese don’t have a scruple in their heads. Not a single scruple.” I minded this warning then and would say it’s still sage advice.
9
That is my experience. When I tried to convey it to Americans when returning home for visits, it was interpreted as racist. No. It’s reality.
3
The Attorney General has no credibility. He is nothing but a political arm of Trump and the Republican Party. While I have no objection to prosecuting those responsible for the Equifax hack, how can we take anything Barr does seriously? He doesn't seem to care about Russian actions of a similar nature, he lends credence to right-wing conspiracy fantasies, and has even failed to explain his mysterious, personal visit to Rupert Murdoch which appears to have been an effort to direct Fox "News" coverage of the Trump Administration. I have no doubt that he will be more than happy to use the DOJ in any way he deems necessary to help re-elect Trump and advance his own hard-right agenda.
5
Remember folks that it is in China's best interests to get the incompetent Trump reelected and that Trump asked them to help him - he's on record with that. Dump Trump, No Matter What.
1
all enabled by the transnational corporate pirates who created the Chinese economic juggernaut
3
There needs to be greater accountability for data breaches and stricter legal requirements for a corporation to be able to amass such data bases. Also, greater education of citizens about what their year of free credit monitoring actually does. I have been involved in breaches by OPM, State of SC, Equifax, Target, Scottrade, and U. of Miami Hospital. The U. of Miami Hospital was first. While still under the monitoring from that breach, the breach of SC income tax information occurred. It turned out the free credit monitoring company was the same for both. When I called and asked if I should sign up again after the SC breach, I was told there was no need because the coverage bought by the UM Hospital was "much better" than the coverage bought by SC. Obviously, SC bought a more cut-rate policy. We need to know more about such things.
1
"The biggest of those breaches was the theft in 2015"
And who was President then?
OBAMA
1
How do we know it is not a 400 pound guy sitting on his bed in his mothers basement?
The Chinese people and Xi love Mr. Trump.
He knows many Chinese people and his likes egg rolls.
It might be Hillary and Counterstrike.
Maybe it's just fake news.
Whomever is responsible, neither Trump nors his minions own any responsibility for the theft or prevention of future thefts.
It was more likely Saudi Arabia but the Trump admin would not dare say so.
"The information stolen from Equifax would reveal whether any of those officials are also under financial stress, and thus susceptible to bribery or blackmail."
Someone must have hacked into Trump's brain with his giveaways to Saudi Arabia, Russia, Israel, corporations, and rich people.
1
One more out of thousands of reasons for Americans to boycott anything made partially or wholly in mainland communist China. Say ‘no’ to Walmart, Costco, HomeDepot and Amazon. Then consider the health risks if you buy any consumables made or processed in China for you or your pets. Push back hard. Say no to this evildoer and enemy of America an democracies everywhere.
7
@Charlie Chan I have been doing it for a while it feels good. no chinese junk in my life.
3
Nice try, but I don’t believe a single word of this lying government attempting to conveniently blame a foreign country for what is simply Equifax’s incompetence.
Note that there will be no settlement payout either.
1
Maybe it is time for Trump to do a three-way deal with Iran, China and North Korea to get their credentials to join the real world and stop their incompetent policies once and for all.
Perhaps Trump can get the Chinese to use that information against his domestic enemies in exchange for a better trade deal?
1
Mr. Barr, considering the brotherly love relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, have we had any luck apprehending any of the 12 Russian military officers indicted in 2018 by the Justice Department for the cyberattacks against the DNC during the 2016 election?
2
Why are we not hearing Democrats debate our country’s strategy for this defacto war with China?
- intellectual property theft
- 5G infrastructure among The Five Eyes
- China’s plan to control infrastructure around the world with One Belt One Road
- China’s creation of social credit scores for the world, not just Chinese
- Harvesting organs from living “donors”
- Creation of super humans through genetic engineering
This is serious stuff and I’m not seeing it being addressed.
5
How is this any different than if the Chinese military were to physically come to our shores and attack our people?
4
It's almost as if China isn't a friendly country.
It's almost as if off shoring as much as possible to China, bringing in thousands of Chinese nationals to our universities and high schools, and turning a blind eye to Chinese theft of IP, didn't appease the Dragon.
5
I blame Equifax. Prosecute them as well.
4
If Barr had any courage or integrity he'd tell his boss that the best way to pressure China would be to revive the TransPacific Partnership.
1
Gosh. And our justice department was able to ferret out four perpetrators, all of whom reside in China....in their military? So not one person will be actually brought to justice, Equifax is off the hook, and the government can wash its hands of the issue if a citizen's information is misused. A perfect white wash if I have ever seen one, Mr. Barr. Kudos.
1
While Trump overfunds tanks, missiles and guns and bullets for the 20th century military-industrial-complex, our country, our privacy, our democracy and elections have been completely invaded and defeated from cybersecurity invasions by other nation states and hackers and the federal government's refusal to protect its citizens.
This country needs as 21st century refresh and reset before it collapses from federal cluelessness, incompetence and corporate servitude.
Put a few Equifax charlatans in jail for starters and threaten the rest of negligent corporate America for failing to protect American citizens' private data.
248
@Socrates Put a few Wells Fargo and pharmaceutical charlatans in jail with them.
23
@Socrates How can Trump make private sector business more secure? Are you a communist or capitalist? What method of government control are you advocating? What about the private sectors duty to safeguard its customers data? And do you even have a clue how much money China is spending on their military build-up over the past 25 years? Some of their technology is more advanced than the US, they have an operational railgun on their ships and hypersonic missile technology well advanced beyond the US. They are now building aircraft carriers and domestic passenger airplanes. China's growth has been fueled by imports to US thanks to Bill Clinton making China the most favored nation trading partner back in the 1990s. You blame Trump for cyberattacks on a private company that was warned about its vulnerabilities and did not do anything to protect its customers. Ignorance is bliss.
11
@Dave
Passing and enforcing progressive laws that hold corporate Robber Barons accountable for their gross negligence by prosecuting and incarcerating them instead of slapping them on a wrist or completely ignoring their negligence is what this country needs.
American companies have caused massive damage to citizens with their data harvesting and data loss.
These companies' private data-organ-harvesting business models deserve to be shuttered.
All they do is privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
Congress can effectively legislate them into compliance, prison and/or extinction.
32
Isn't this a very serious international incident? Chinese military personnel accused of stealing the information on people from another country?
I have no clue how US can respond, charging those individuals means nothing really, they stand for their country, not for themselves.
Kudos to Trump for being the only president who is serious (at last to an extent) about China and recognizing that, given the chance, they would smash USA as hard as they could. And condemnation for NYT and majority of its audience who often times mindlessly support China (in the trade dispute) merely as a tool to spite and overthrow Trump.
1
Why is this information suddenly treated as if it were a state secret? Why should anyone care if it is "stolen"?
Our privacy hysteria is destructive.
Right. This has nothing to do with Equifax's complete negligence in handling our information, even though it is patently obvious that the type of data they hold is at the top of the target list.
I would add that Equifax makes countless millions off of a government-issued - required - number that we really have to have in order to function in our country legally and economically.
Any serious IT security professional who operates in the know will tell you privately that virtually every adult SSN has already been stolen in any number of both disclosed and, more critically, non-disclosed hacks.
There is zero diversity of identification when it comes to American citizens and permanent residents. The SSN was never intended to be what it has become: an easily stolen universal identifier. When the numbers were first issued, they were for a very limited non-digital use - a social pension plan established in 1935 in the wake of the depression.
They morphed into the threat they have become with the implicit support of the U.S. government.
Case in point: to prevent child labor abuse, a person could not get a SSN until the age of 12. The government now urges that newborns get a SSN at birth.
There is no direct law forcing a person to get a SSN. However, try living and working in the USA without one.
Don't you think every hacker out there laughs at the insanity of a system that makes it simple to steal the one number that is pegged to an American for life?
They do.
1
None of this would be a surprise to anyone that was reading China news in the 1990's; the darling of the China strategy has been stated bluntly in their publications, tactics under the header 'asymmetrical warfare' will provide the PRC with what they need to rule the planet. Just go on Lexis Nexus.
2
So what is the real answer to identity theft?
Right now personal bits of information are how we express our individual lives in society.
Perhaps a total paradigm shift needs to take place: Somehow, personal information should be rendered valueless.
The answer is not to be found in new, improved methods of securing our identities. e.g. biometrics is an obvious way to distinctly identify me as me. But biometrics is not bullet-proof and the underlying paradigm remains. It's just a security improvement, but the core notion remains that personal information is everything. As long as we persist with this paradigm, the essential vulnerabilities will be forever with us. We're mice in a cat & mouse game. The cats keep evolving and the mice keep reacting.
What we need to do is figure out a major paradigm shift so that this information is just no longer vital. What if writing my mother’s maiden name and my SS number on my car door with a marker did not matter at all? Want to copy my fingerprints, maybe clone my retina? Whatever!
It’s no longer a cat & mouse game IF THERE ARE NO MICE.
The question I have is how this would affect the outcome of the judgement against Equifax? I'm wondering if by making this an act of espionage, they are no longer responsible to pay damages to the many Americans in the class action lawsuits. Did Barr just give them a shield? Are there any special interests involved in coming out with this indictment?
Why charge officers and not their superiors, who would have issued their orders? And they are government employees, so why not the government? Will charging the individuals accomplish anything?
Why are rating agencies continue to collect detailed personal data?
What's the excuse of keeping anything besides person's creditworthiness?
1
It's way past time for social security numbers to be used only for social security and not the go-to ID number for every single person.
2
In reading this article I first thought it was a follow-up to the Times Feb. 7 article "The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans".
China hacking into US data sites would be shocking if not for the realization that various US government agencies are allowed to do so under H.R.4681 – Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 which was severely criticized by Rep. Justin Amash because "It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American".
The question arises then, "Should we be more concerned if the Chinese or the Trump administration can surveil American citizens?"
1
Trump is way too soft on China, but it's better than nothing, which is what we had before.
1
The Chinese are hoovering data from US research universities, corporations, public companies, then cross-linking stolen and legal information. Any ideas why is it such a crucial issue for Chinese officials to maintain the open pipeline to Chinese students and researchers?!
3
I think, a new set of SSN numbers (maybe longer by one-two digits) should be generated by government for each American, and a link should be sent to each person (they know your most recent address from last tax return) where you get the actual number after your identity is verified online by answering to several questions that only you and government know. Each instance your personal information is stolen, a new SSN number gets generated at your request. We all have too long a tail of businesses, agencies, dental and doctor offices where we left our information over many years, including SSN. We should start afresh!
1
I again applaud the Times for allowing comments on an article about china. I'm sure it floods them with pro-CCP messages, but it is vital that we maintain spaces where we can have honest and informed discussions about China and its threatening of democracy and freedom in the world.
4
It is time for the US to go on the counterattack in a big way against China for cyber warfare.
We can not continue to allow them to pierce our government and corporate databases for their own ends.
We need to hit back every time a new breach is discovered.
We should assist our industries in hacking Chinese companies so we can propel our expertise in 5G telecom, artificial intelligence and cyber techniques.
We need to stop being their patsy.
48
@DJohn
The best offense is defense.
3
@DJohn
In this regard, defense hardening is the better approach.
No reason to start an internet cyber cold war.
Besides.. China is only one bad actor here, and by no means the worst in the pack.
China does this to gain economic advantages... via use of data to influence people who have valuable information. As China's biggest trading partnet in the world.. they know not to kill the goose.
Russia on the other hand.. they commit cyber warfare with the goal of destabilizing our democracy and turning us on each other... civil war style.
13
@DJohn Our companies can take care of their own,but the USA has to take a stand against all CCP technology.
Every phone and even TV is infested with spy capabilities.
The major problem here is that we have allowed the Social Security number to become a universal password for identification purposes. We ought to be assuming that one’s SSN is no more secret/secure than one’s phone number. Just because I know someone’s SSN does not make me that person.
How about we make it illegal to use the SSN for identification purposes?
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@Mike Wyman Well, it says right there in the SS card we're issued "not to be used for identification"... but I had to produce mine the last time I renewed my driver's license.
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@Mike Wyman
The value of a social security number is that it precisely states who a person CLAIMS to be. In short, it distinguishes the claim of one John Smith from the claim of another John Smith. So, the social security number has a very important value in the identification process.
The social security number does not prove that the person who tenders the number is the person he claims to be. For that, some other identifying factor, such as a biometric (a photo id is a kind of biometric) or a password.
Banks and others should never be permitted to base a claim upon the fact that person presented a social security number or even a social security card, since that is only one part of the identity equation. A financial claim based solely upon a social security number should be rejected and penalized.
Similarly, a biometric, alone, is inadequate, unless it is linked to a unique number, such as a social security number, that pinpoints which identity the person is claiming.
One of the dangers of identity systems is that they can expose a person's life-long activities and preferences. That is why Congress has been derelict in its failure to specifically regulate the security of identity systems and of corporate records concerning people.
What these Chinese generals were trying to do is exactly what corporations and information brokers and government agencies do every day to the general population - without any meaningful regulation.
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@Mike Wyman , Right. That's the easy part. And replace it with what?
As Mr. Wray, FBI Director has pointed out - "that China is willing to steal their way to go up the economic ladder, at our expense". We see this related news several times in the media. The question is, what are we doing about it?
China has no innovation or show creativity in any field. A Communist country, now an economic power.
The US, Europe and other countries have largely helped China to grow economically. Utilizing the benefits of a large manpower China has to offer. Cheap labor - lower production costs.
If the outside world has helped China to become the world production center, that is what makes China the economic power. In spite of that, if China has to continue hacking and stealing from other countries, the way to deal with China is in Trade. Pull out all the plants and factories from that country, and spread them among other deserving locations. Because, China's goal is to make money, and nothing else.
The US has been skeptical of China's true intentions on the Huawei 5G project. The caution may be necessary.
We have seen how China has been reacting to the recent outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic. This is now impacting the entire world.
If China has to be a player on the world stage, it should not be on their terms. The world community must provide this message to China.
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@CITIZEN
While much of what you say has merit....
"China has no innovation or show creativity in any field."...
…. is an incorrect and a misguided (naïvely underestimating) approach moving forward.
2
Here is another example of irreparable damage to the fiber of the US thanks to China. I am hoping the pressure stays on in the UK against including Huawei for security concerns. It is time to make them play a different game if they want to be a major player.
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Of course, the hack was enabled by Equifax not patching known issues on their servers.
The bigger question is why this data is on Equifax's servers in the first place. I have no relationship with this firm, yet it is allowed to store my personally identifiable information? Why?
And for losing it, I can claim what? A monetary pittance or credit monitoring by the same firm that lost the data in the first place. Seriously, C-Suite staff at Equifax should be doing hard time with the general inmate population for this, and every bit of their salary and bonus should be clawed back and added to the pool of money to be distributed. This was gross negligence and incompetence they were overseeing.
Of course, no one has to hack in to get the data from Facebook, Google and the rest of the surveillance economy, it is for sale, and those who do not think that it is being purchased by shell companies for foreign governments, and probably our own, are naive.
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John, you hit the nail on the head!
The main issue is not that the Chinese hacked into American and corporate databases. Rather, it is why we, the American people, have entrusted all this information to the internet. And yes, it is us, not the government that is at fault, though had we had real leadership these past few decades, we might have spared ourselves web dependency and addiction.
Countries are going to spy, corporations will pretend they are secure and have your interest at heart, politicians will rarely lead, and the large majority of people will self-delude for the sake of convenience, gossip, and their daily fix of electronically induced endorphins.
There is no privacy or security on the internet nor can there ever be, and as much as we hate to admit it, the bad guys (however you choose to define them) are as smart as the good guys and are often more motivated.
The other question this article begs is why there is no enforcement mechanism when security vulnerabilities are discovered. If Experian was informed of the problem two months before the attack, why do we not have the legal means to force closure of the vulnerability? (That's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.) Why are the individuals who made the decisions to allow the exposure of your personal info not subject to criminal penalties? Why are corporations allowed to simply consider fines a cost of doing business? (Another rhetorical question.) Most importantly, when will people say, "Enough!"
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@John The US is now an oligarchy. The corporations, the sociopaths that run them, the Republicans in Congress, and the federal judges they have installed will see to it that that the only one who takes responsibility for this situation is you.
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@John
and now Equifax and the others will "sell you" fraud monitoring protection.
18
China is not our friend. They will do anything to subjugate us if they could just like they do to their own people if they don't surrender. One thing is guaranteed, Trump stand on China and illegal immigration will hand him an almost certain second term. As a life long democrat, I will vote for any one who solves these two major problems so that we can start building in earnest. Trump is a disgusting human being but he may be what we need to brake this pattern of kicking the can instead of fixing it.
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@JG - not actually, the Trans-Pacific Trade agreement he destroyed a few days after to coming into office, was America's best hope to moderate the chilling effects of China's reach for control of the planet and into space.
Sad truth is, no one will win, unless we work together, and that is so unlike China's current dictator-for-life.
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@JG "Trump is a disgusting human being, BUT..."
Nope, sorry JG in Denver, there can be NO 'buts'. America survived his first term, it cannot survive a second one.
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@JG On Trump we agree...also on China. They steal and plunder and we need to mount our defences instead of the phony wall Trump plunders all our taxpayer dollars on. It will not work, has already been breeched and merely panders to the same type of xenophobia the Republicans spew. They are so pathetically afraid of dissent from one of theirs...named Mitt Romney. Like McCarthyism all over again.
2
On what grounds is this charge? Should Iran be filing hacking charge re the Stuxnet infiltration by [supposedly] US and Israel.
A US resident reporter was murdered by Saudi ‘operatives’ - where is the charge on that?
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What does this say about trusting the Chinese with supplying the 5G network?
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It says we should only let American corporations implement 5G, because they can really be trusted. Something like that. I guess. Maybe.
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@Eric ++ Yes, certainly. Perhaps Equifax would agree to implement 5G because they're an American company. Oh wait a minute........
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@Bill
Thanks for bringing up the dangers of 5G. Check out this article. Below the link is a quote from it.
https://safeg.net/5g-privacy-security/
"The real reason the wireless industry wants to hook all your appliances, home heating and air-conditioning system, security system, and automobile to wireless monitors and transmitters has nothing to do with your convenience. The purpose is actually to harvest information about every aspect of your life."
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The middle kingdom is different, by culture as well as sensibility.
Our economic model over the past 30 years never took that into account. Furthermore, the Chinese, are a hardy, hardworking and organized folk. When the state demands tech transfer for access the red light should go off.
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Glad I got some free credit monitoring out of this :/
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@B Kellogg - The free monitoring should suggest that your data was compromised and it may be a while before the consequences of that hack will be felt by those affected. I wouldn't celebrate just yet!
1
So, is this like a real legitimate investigation based on facts and intel, or is this a political investigation based on little besides the autocratic desires of Our Dear Leader?
How on earth are we supposed to know, Mr Barr?
Oh, right, like you would care.
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@chickpea. Beware of non-sequiturs.
2
@Chickpea
Yes - how can we believe anything Barr says. We've seen him in action. Corrupt, strange.
4
China looks out for China. American companies should have realized when they rushed to save money doing business with the Chinese that this would happen. It's no secret that China has been stealing research data from universities in America for a long time.
Now 145 million Americans had their private information stolen.
When will America wake up?
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@Jacquie You don't get it. American business owners don't give a rats behind if other Americans are hurt by their actions. Think about that as Mr. Trump and his legions deregulate every entity they can that monitors or controls
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@Jacquie you can’t have it both ways. Either the US government “fixes” the issues with China, as Trump has demonstrated his appetite to rein in China, or its business as usual.
Anything the US does to protect itself from China will cause some kind of interruption to business and economy because our economies are so deeply entwined. We have to be OK with that if we’re going to make any progress for the US on this front
2
@qisqisqis Trump couldn't rein in a horse let alone China.
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And of course we have no recourse. My information was stolen through Equifax and I have battled this problem for several years. It was nice of Equifax to offer to pay victims, however, went back on their word on that one. We have given these reporting agencies too much power, yet they provide no protection for all the information they are collecting and in many cases erroneously attaching to your file. After-all, it costs money to put those protections in place.
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There was a time when an act of such hostility would produce a strong US response. Problem is that our political leaders are beholden to a donor class that makes money in China by operating US businesses there or makes money on China by engaging with the vast capital inflows from China to the US.
I don't care whether the DOJ indicts four Chinese generals or even if China extradites them to the US for trial. It is past time for the US, as a nation, to impose vast economic sanctions on China and its major trading partners. China won't play fair until China must play fair. And its major trading partners need to choose: China or US.
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@maqroll Well put. Sharp and to the point.
Why can’t they just show us at least some of the proofs? I went through the court file, but the only exhibits are photos of some people
5
What is the nature of the trade secrets that Equifax has?
1
So what? The big question is still, why did Equifax have all this consolidated data, in unencrypted format?
The base crime is still Equifax's problem. I didn't ask them to store my data, you didn't ask them to store your data, and yet there it was, ripe for the picking.
Why are they allowed to remain in business?
Here is another thought. Reissue new SSNs, with about four extra digits, to every surviving American, and stop using it for identity verification.
Render the SSN useless as an identifier, and the value of the theft goes down significantly.
And close Equifax. Take their stock value to zero. Don't allow them to sell their current data holdings to another company. Push all of their data center equipment into an industrial shredder, then melt down and recycle the scraps.
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@Doug
Stop using our birth dates to verify our identity, also. Medical sector abuses this.
6
@Doug Equifax needs to be shut down. As a quasi monopoly company, they need to be held to higher standards, not lower. Take the stock to 0 and let another company have the business. How many more data breaches must Americans endure before we realize they are incapable of conducting their business according to best practices?
5
Economic and data warfare is still warfare. The Chinese are playing chess and our responses look like we’re doing next to nothing.
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@Greg Tutunjian : We are! China is just better at it than we are!
1
China, if your listening, please tell us Trump's Equifax credit score. It's OK, the Republicans said we could do this.
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@Rick Gage : Gold
China, a little help on the tax returns as well?
9
For some reason, this AG does not inspire my confidence that what he says is in fact the case.
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@Maggie
Yeah, he looks like the type that would lie to you about Chinese military hackers, doesn't he? Solid observation.
.
So, no problem. File an amicus brief and let the court know your concerns. No doubt they'll dismiss the charges.
1
I still blame equifax. If your business model is dependent on the financial data of millions of americans, that data should be in an metaphoric iron clad safe buried 100 ft underground.
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Will Xi reassure Trump he didn't do it? Will Trump again betray the U.S. by siding with a hostile foreign power? Place your bets.
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US and its institutions do this all the time to other countries. This becomes news because US considers itself "exceptional".
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@Lone Do we? All the time? For profit?
This is so unnecessary. They could have just paid Zuckerberg for it.
13
It seems to me that the CIA (or FBI) should just use paper for their top secret records (ie. covert spies) Sure, paperwork can be stolen, but the risk far lower than computer records being hacked. Sometimes the “old” way is better.
10
Persons working for the NSA (and co-conspiring services in the "Five Eyes"coalition) apparently siphon off data of millions of citizen of the world (myself included, I presume) on a daily basis and completely illegally, according to the revelations of Edgar Snowden and others. Where is the Grand Jury, where are the charges?
10
China if you are listening release Trump s taxes. I m sure you will be rewarded.
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Spy vs. Spy. If the CIA and NSA are not hacking China THAT would be a front page article.
12
It is a shame that as soon as I see Barr’s name,I doubt anything that he says.
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Why the shame?
Everything this administration does has a domestic political agenda.
Accusing foreign state officials of crimes is a preamble to wider confrontation, probably military.
If Trump wins re-election, it would be by the sheer ignorance of the electorate of his ploys.
1
I don’t know who I trust less. China or William Barr.
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@DSD I do, and it's William Barr.
5
Social Security Number.
Wiki: "Although the original purpose for the number was for the Social Security Administration to track individuals,[1] the Social Security number has become a de facto national identification number for taxation and other purposes.[2]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number
6
Why do I feel like any end of the world scenario is going to begin with China?
8
I think we have arrived at a place where we need to assume that “they” have all of our data already. We then have to move forward making sure that this fact doesn’t mean what it once did for our security and privacy.
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@Red Tree Hill
What did we ever do before the internet?
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@Red Tree Hill
That's right. Going forward, the onus for opening account or extending credit falsely and the ramifications (damage to actual person included) should lie directly with the institution or business. The new rule should be "creditor beware" and the credo much as banks use; "know your endorser" even if it means the end to the "on the spot" credit approvals.
4
Wonder if The Donald says if this is fake or not.
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@MB Depends on what Putin told him.
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@wyatt Well said!
Isn't that just like Republicans to feel left out of the love fest that promotes peace and good will only to kick a nation when it's down? Yup! typical Republican. And why did you let Trump go after the damning Mueller report Barr? But even more important; why does the American protection racket federal government let a corporation hold our sensitive personal and constitutionally protected private information in the first place? It's been three years since the breach. Why now Barr? I'll bet you guys just can't handle peace in the world, can you? Do you guys have some sick population control agenda with your typical efforts to have a war every decade when you get in power? And how about the military mantra; "Pivot To Asia"? Do you think maybe, just maybe, that made the Chinese paranoid of us? I do. I don't like them having my information so don't bother me, but your timing reeks of trouble making or a bizarre need for attention. You and Trump have a lot in common. My parents loved me.
4
This country (China) keeps sucker punching us in the gut while we continue to train their people to be pilots - many of whom will end up in their Air Force. Gotta love that quid pro quo.
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@Gary Keller
'We' train? You mean private Chinese citizens flock to private American flying schools? Like the 9/11 hijackers did?
Just get private flying schools to stop taking Chinese students, then. And wave goodbye to American jobs.
Quite frankly, teaching people to fly single engine light planes - and even passenger jets - is something that many other countries can offer. You make it sound as if these students are being given F-35 simulator time.
@nolongeradoc "Just get private flying schools to stop taking Chinese students" That should be easy. You have to start somewhere before working up to fighter jets. It is a shorter list of what other countries can offer in the way of flight school training than you think. Most are not too keen on the leaded fuel that flying schools are still using. US, Australia and Canada are the major recipients of those emissions.
Proof?
The citizens would like to seek proof.
or is it going to be like Suleimani - attack - there may be repercussions if they plan to do suleimani style actions?
4
I thought "Individual #1" and Xi were good friends and that "Individual # 1" was going to make America safe again. What happened?
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@thewhigs I notice that the theft did happen in 2015, before the ascendance of Individual #1. Still, with friends like that...
I feel better knowing that 'criminals' haven't gotten the information.
But I feel this is almost an act of war. I'm a loan officer at a large Credit Union, and the amount of panic that people displayed about that hack was large and still being felt. To say that a foreign government was responsible for a mindstate that was approaching hysteria....
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@adam - Yes, Americans still mostly believe that stealing information is not equal to stealing one's children.
Time to wake up everyone, this is 2020, and technology, AI and robots will not make for a more compassionate world...
2
Now the Chinese can do what the American upper classes have been doing to us with this data. Control our lives by controlling our credit score.
14
Perhaps instead of haplessly standing by while China steals all our information the government could impose sanctions on Chinese Communist Party members, including seizing the assets, homes, and businesses owned by Communist Party members in order to reimburse American citizens who have been harmed by these crimes.
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@John Just one step away from Japanese internment. Americans never learn from any of their mistakes. The only modern bane of world peace.
@John
How about we just stop trading with that regime, full stop? The world stopped trading with South Africa, and they were hardly the threat globally that the Chinese Communist Party is.
.
Time to wake up. The CCP want to bury us. Regime change? You bet. Stop feeding that monster and let the people of China do the necessary. If the CCP are smart, they'll make elections happen.
3
Is this news as bad as I think it is?
China virtually owns us. They, whoever that is, could steal all our money, put it in a hidden bank account somewhere -- Switzerland? Cayman Islands? -- where it's gone to us forever.
The intelligence damage done is harder to describe, but worse than being broke: They know more about us than we know; and they know how to use it to their advantage and to our disadvantage. Holy smokes!
Should I panic now or later?
(The joke's kinda on China in my case: I have very little money. So, out of pity, they may leave me alone. You other guys might have problems, though.)
10
@Jim Muncy The theft (which included my private information) occurred 3 years ago. A little late to panic.
4
@Bill
Missed that part. Whew! I guess.
For I do need that $127 I have in the bank.
What better way to track the trade war than to monitor the data used in credit scores? China is already using tariffs to target Trump's base. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/03/business/economy/china-tariff-retaliation.html
1
Article would be more relevant if one were made aware of the data and companies held by EQUIFAX. After reading this, I have a 50-50 chance of my data having been stolen.
1
Would our present government use such information any differently than the Chinese would?
2
@CA The U.S. Government already has your Social Security number since it issued it to you.
3
it's amazing that attorney general barr could recognize this deliberate and seeping intrusion into the private information of the American people, but he can't see Russia's meddling in the last election of trump's solicitation of assistance in the 2020 election.
didn't trump just thank xi jinping on his handling of the coronavirus situation in China?
now it makes sense - things that hurt the people are worthy of admiration.
he had to know that the justice department was getting ready to announce these charges.
what the heck is going on in our government? certainly nothing to protect our people or elections. these charges are too little-too late. the information has been taken.
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@Steve Ell
We see what we want to see.
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@Steve Ell - I suggest...don't go there. Just soberly acknowledge the unthinkable already exists; that slimy anthropoids within the GOP are staging a subversive coup in America. Barr is simply a leader of a mindless army...
And then one will be shocked far less, and you can use your managed anger and focused intellect to defeat them in every election until they remember the difference between democracy vs an oligarchy, honor in patriotism vs subversion through nationalism.
2
@Steve Ell
Do a google search of the USA Today article about the 3500+ Facebook ads bought by the indicted Russian troll farms. Only 100 mentioned either candidate, less than 3%. And of those, some were anti-Trump.
The interference has been grossly exaggerated.
I can certainly believe this is true. So, now that our government has announced it, what do we plan to do about it? It would have been helpful to hear a hint on that score. And why does Trump’s government out Chinese military hackers, and ignore Russian ones?
8
Distressing news, to be sure.
I have excellent security on my phone and laptop and I am constantly being informed of attempts to break through that security.
So far so good.
But, who else has hacked social security and banking information?Russia?
Many of my friends keep a credit card to use on their Facebook account. I think they are nuts.
I never save payment information on any site.
I get notifications of any expenditure of $20 or more on the two credit cards I use.
Equifax as a security measure is a complete scam.
22
@American 2020
The "credit reporting agencies"are not security for us measures. They are ways to control people by making their lives harder and blaming them for it.
The whole thing has always been a sham from when it started as a way to red line home buyers. That is keep black people out of "white neighborhoods".
5
@magicisnotreal The credit reporting agencies have no way to know who is black and who is white. Maybe the problem instead is that low credit scores keep people from getting good mortgage rates? Why not help black people improve their credit-
1