The ObamaCare privacy concerns are mounting with two new revelations regarding the technological soundness of the HealthCare.gov site and hacker attacks.
The federal website HealthCare.gov crashed again Sunday, with major tech issues continuing into Monday. The software for verifying and protecting the personal information of applicants broke down. Government officials blamed the crash on an outside private sector contractor, Verizon, but the failures in the so-called “data hub” are worsening fears about security first raised ahead of the launch.
Federal inspectors issued multiple reports before Oct. 1 that found major problems in the plan to merge and protect the most comprehensive profiles of American citizens ever compiled by the government.
“Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement Sunday evening. “[Health and Human Services] Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible.”
Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, of which Terremark is a part, told the Associated Press: “Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will be fixed as quickly as possible.”
But the technological challenges surrounding the software code construction on the site are not the only ObamaCare privacy concerns as of late. Sunday, hackers compromised a page on President Obama’s fundraising site, donate.barackobama.com, which temporarily redirected users to a website, sea.sy/indexs/. The website appears to belong to the infamous hacking group Syrian Electronic Army, which is the group behind the compromised New York Post Facebook page and multiple prominent Twitter accounts. When redirected, users read “Hacked by SEA.”
Then, on Monday, the group again struck again, this time hijacking President Obama’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as Gmail accounts. The information compromised was private and sensitive, including donor and contributor information, or pretty much everything related to backend website access.
The latest concerns come just days before Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding the problems that have plagued the online website “exchange” since it’s failed launched on October 1.
Until the American people get the clarification and answers they deserve, they would be wise to avoid the dangers altogether.
