STUMP » Articles » Obamacare Watch: 31 Jan 2014 — Criminals and Exchanges » 31 January 2014, 04:39

Now why would anybody be worried about being a target of crime because they used an Obamacare exchange?

Hmmmm.

California has released some disturbing statistics on criminal backgrounds of its navigators, I report today.

A few findings:

At least 43 convicted criminals are working as navigators in California.

One navigator committed forgery twice in twelve years and was also convicted of burglary in between.

One navigator was convicted for committing welfare fraud and had also been caught shoplifting on at least two occasions.

Another navigator had two more forgery convictions, as well as a domestic-violence charge.

At least seven navigators had multiple convictions but were still approved.

Even though applicants are required to self-report prior offenses, records show that 21 prospective certified enrollment counselors failed to do so — and were approved anyway, even though their background check revealed criminal convictions.

In other states, a forgery, welfare-fraud, or other financial-crimes conviction automatically disqualifies applicants from becoming navigators. But in California, that’s not the case.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Top experts today gave members of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee their thoughts about how hackers might try to attack HealthCare.gov.

Members of the committee unanimously voted to close the session to the public, to avoid giving hackers a tutorial on HealthCare.gov vulnerabilities.

HMMMMMMMMMM.

Security expert — and once the world’s most-wanted cyber criminal — Kevin Mitnick submitted a scathing criticism to a House panel Thursday of ObamaCare’s Healthcare.gov website, calling the protections built into the site “shameful” and “minimal.”

In a letter submitted as testimony to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, Mitnick wrote: “It’s shameful the team that built the Healthcare.gov site implemented minimal, if any, security best practices to mitigate the significant risk of a system compromise.”

Mitnick’s letter, submitted to panel Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, held comments from several leading security experts.

Mitnick concluded that, “After reading the documents provided by David Kennedy that detailed numerous security vulnerabilities associated with the Healthcare.gov Website, it’s clear that the management team did not consider security as a priority.”

FWIW, I used to live near where Kevin Mitnick was when he was caught. Good times, good times — my friends were getting caught up in the dot-com boom while I was preparing to waste some time on academic pursuits. Ultimately, we all ended up at about the same place.

But enough reminiscing. I guess the good news is that so few people are using the exchanges, that even if there is some identity theft, it won’t be as many people who were affected by the Target hit.

Therefore, OBAMACARE MUST BE DESTROYED.