Daniel Gonzales for the Rand Corporation: Former government employees and other U.S. citizens may have had their personal information stolen in a cyberattack on the Office of Personnel Management. The General Accounting Office is investigating potential cybersecurity breaches of healthcare.gov, the health insurance exchange website. Sophisticated hackers, possibly from China, have stolen the identities of 80 million Americans from Anthem, a major healthcare insurance company. …
These high-profile attacks have probably been carried out by a combination of nation states and criminals who could be associated with the intelligence services of nation states. They highlight why the United States needs a new identity management and protection strategy to better protect the personal information of U.S. citizens — including government employees — held in cyberspace by federal and state governments. …
The U.S. government needs to develop an identity-protection strategy for its citizens. The strategy should include two key elements — government-issued “identity keys” that are essentially a unique identifying number or code, and, perhaps more importantly, a method for protecting these identity tokens or keys in online transactions.
The strategy could exploit new technologies like those developed in Silicon Valley for mobile payment and online transactions by companies such as Apple and Google. Secure forms of public key infrastructure encryption or the use of temporary one-time tokens also could be used to protect these keys.
These are just examples of several potential technical solutions that could be implemented. A government-wide strategy needs to be devised to develop and implement a secure U.S. electronic identity management architecture.
If such steps are taken, the United States should be able to better protect its citizens from the growing threat of cybercrime — and the U.S. intelligence community, military and key government officials from having to cope with growing hybrid warfare threats.
LOVE SHOULD WIN
Katrina Trinko for the Heritage Foundation: When love wins, it doesn’t take prisoners.
It has been [three weeks] since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all 50 states, and already those with religious objections to same-sex marriage are facing punishment.
Aaron and Melissa Klein, an Oregon Christian couple who refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple in 2013 (before gay marriage was legal in Oregon) were ordered Thursday to pay $135,000 by a state labor commissioner because of their refusal.
Just days after the Supreme Court decision on June 26, New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer wrote a piece for Time magazine suggesting that all nonprofits, both religious and secular, lose their tax-exempt status “rather than try to rescue [it] for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality.”
Oppenheimer’s no conservative fear-monger: The Obama administration’s own solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, acknowledged in the Supreme Court hearing that religious schools could lose their tax-exempt status if the justices legalized gay marriage.
There is a better — and more loving — way: Tolerance, coexistence. …
When love wins, it doesn’t do so by crushing people’s consciences, by forcing them to adhere to what their beliefs tell them is wrong.
No one should understand this better than those in the gay marriage movement, who laudably and vigorously fought for decades, against public opinion and current laws, for what they believed was morally true: that any two adults should be able to legally marry.
UNPAID INTERNSHIPS FAVOR THE WEALTHY
Joanna Venator and Richard V. Reeves for the Brookings Institution: Internships are an important feature of the labor market, especially for college graduates. According to a survey of 43,000 graduating seniors across nearly 700 universities in 2014, 61 percent had had an internship or co-op experience during college, and 53.5 percent of those internships were unpaid. There are big differences between sectors, however. While business, engineering, computer science and financial service interns can expect to finish their summer with money in their pockets, those in the social sciences or humanities are more likely than not to be working for nothing.
Especially in a tough job market, many employers place a good deal of value on intern experience. Internships were ranked as the most important factor in deciding whether to hire a recent college graduate or not, according to a 2012 survey of human resources professionals, managers and executives from 50,000 employers, commissioned by the Chronicles of Higher Education
This makes sense. Employers understandably prefer someone who has some knowledge and understanding of their field. But the results are deeply unfair, if this work experience is only available in the shape of an unpaid internship in an expensive city. Even for those who can survive for a while without an income, the costs of living in the intern capitals — New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. — are beyond the reach of most low-income and even middle-income students.
Compiled by Nathan Rubbelke from think tank research
