NASA hired 118 Chinese nationals to work on IT matters

Washington Examiner:
NASA employs 118 Chinese nationals in "remotely-based" information technology jobs that may enable them to penetrate the space agency's national security database servers, The Washington Examiner has learned.

But NASA administrator Charles Bolden said nothing about these individuals during his testimony last week before a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on cyber espionage threats against the space agency.

Bolden told the panel he counted 192 Chinese nationals in positions with "physical access" to NASA facilities like its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and Ames Research Center near San Francisco.

The 118 employees with remote access were described in a sensitive but classified NASA document given to the subcommittee separately from Bolden's testimony.

The Washington Examiner obtained a subcommittee summary of the document, which described the 118 individuals as having "varying degrees of access" to NASA research and databases.

Rep. Frank Wolf, the subcommittee chairman, told The Washington Examiner he found the discrepancy troubling because "the numbers didn't match" with other data he had seen.
... 
So, why does NASA think this is a good idea?  On the surface it seems laden with risk of exposing national security secrets to non US citizens who happen to be from the country that most seem to think is engaged in a cyber war with us.  NASA has been targeted by China for data and the FBI recently arrested a man as he was boarding a plane for China.  We need to find who is responsible for these hiring decisions.

The Washington Post reports that a Chinese citizen has been sentenced to over five years in prison for theft of documents and a device used to target rockets without satellite guidance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more