Alert: Federal Gov’t Admits Shocking Blunder That Will Impact Millions Of Americans

The federal government has now admitted that over 5 million fingerprints were stolen in a massive data breach. That’s up from the 1 million admitted previously.

The data breach was reported as far back as July and at the time it was said that as many as 1 million finger prints were stolen from the Office of Personnel Management in Washington. But now, new estimates have placed that number at five times the original estimate.

In a statement, OPM and the Defense Department say that they have discovered that far more fingerprints were taken than previously thought.

“The subset of individuals whose fingerprints have been stolen has increased from a total of approximately 1.1 million to approximately 5.6 million,” OPM said on Wednesday. “This does not increase the overall estimate of 21.5 million individuals impacted by the incident. An interagency team will continue to analyze and refine the data as it prepares to mail notification letters to impacted individuals.”

According to Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, the timing of this statement is suspect. He thinks that the White House orchestrated the release of this information to coincide with the Pope’s visit in order to ensure that the media would not pay much attention to the news.

“Today’s blatant news dump is the clearest sign yet that the administration still acts like the OPM hack is a PR crisis instead of a national security threat,” Sen. Sasse said. “The American people have no reason to believe that they’ve heard the full story and every reason to believe that Washington assumes they are too stupid or preoccupied to care about cyber security.”

Sasse has also said that OPM’s dithering is emboldening the hackers.

Without established deterrents, foreign governments and cyber crime rings have gotten “bolder and bolder” with their attacks on the U.S., Sasse said in July.

Whatever the motivations of the timing of the announcement, OPM insists that the fingerprint data is “of limited use” to the hackers. But the agency promised to review those uses.

“Therefore, an interagency working group with expertise in this area–including the FBI, DHS, DOD, and other members of the Intelligence Community–will review the potential ways adversaries could misuse fingerprint data now and in the future,” OPM said in a statement.

With each new piece of news about the various data breaches suffered by the federal government, including the loss of Social Security and IRS info of millions of Americans, this hack seems to only get worse.

Already one head has rolled over the data breach. OPM head Katherine Archuleta resigned after the hack was revealed to the public.