State Department officials have the power to “read, modify, [or] delete” the investigations conducted by the inspector general tasked with providing independent oversight of.
“If they wanted to, they could read, modify, delete any of our work,” Steve Linick, the State Department inspector general, told Senator David Perdue (R., Ga.) during a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing Tuesday. Linick made the comment while explaining that his office and the rest of the State Department are on the same computer system.
“Because right now, we’re sort of in a gated community, if you will, where we rent our IT system and the IT folks at the Department have the keys to our IT system,” he explained. “So they really have unfettered access to the system.”
Linick’s statement came in the context of his discussion of whether the IG computer system had ever been hacked. He didn’t say specifically if State Department officials had done so, or if they had merely been affected by the same kinds of cyberattacks that have been launched at the rest of the State Department. “To the extent that the Department suffers from attacks, we suffer from attacks because we’re on the same network,” Linick said.
He did emphasize that his agency had to ask the State Department not to access his computers, though.
“We’ve taken a number of steps since I’ve been in office,” Linick said. “First of all, we’ve asked the Department to agree not to come onto our system without asking permission. And finally, we’ve gotten that agreement from the Department. But we need more than that.”
– Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.
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