Here is a transcript of Donna Seymour's testimony to which
Daily Beast reporter Shane Harris referred in his article, in context. She was being questioned by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD):
Quote:Rep. Elijah Cummings: Miss Seymour, this data breach is particularly concerning because the individuals who were targeted were government employees and the suspected attackers are foreign entities. I’m concerned that this breach may pose a national security threat. According to a statement from OPM, the personal information of approximately four million current and former government employees was compromised in this breach. What can you tell us about the type of personal information that was compromised in this breach?
Donna Seymour: Thank you for the question, sir. The type of information involved in the personnel records breach includes typical information about job assignments, some performance ratings, not evaluations, but performance ratings, as well as training records for our personnel. The information involved in the background investigations incident involves SF-86 data as well as clearance adjudication information.
Rep. Cummings: So, social security numbers?
Seymour: Yes sir. Social security number, date of birth, place of birth. Typical P.I.I. that would be in those types of files.
Rep. Cummings: Miss Seymour, it was reported on Friday that in addition to this breach, hackers had reached highly sensitive information gathered in the background investigations of current and former federal employees. Is that true?
Seymour: Yes, sir. that is.
Rep. Cummings: Do you know how far back that goes?
Seymour: No sir, I don’t. These are—the issue is that these are longitudinal records so they span the employee’s, you know, career, and so I do not know what the oldest record is.
Rep. Cummings: So it’s possible that somebody could be working for the federal government for thirty years, and their information over that thirty years could have been breached here?
Seymour: Yes sir. These records do span an employee’s career.
Rep. Cummings: So what can you tell us about the type of information that may have been compromised in this, in the second breach?
Seymour: I believe that that would be a discussion that would be better had in our classified session this afternoon, sir.
Rep. Cummings: Thank you. I’m going to come back to you.…
It's not clear to me why the type of information that may have been compromised should be kept a secret from the American people (including those affected, which will include many readers and participants of this forum). After all, the people who compromised the data presumably know what they've got.
Video of the 16 May 2015 congressional hearing on the OPM data breach is available here:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?326593-1/hearing-office-personnel-management-data-b... The exchange between Cummings and Seymour begins at 01:03:05.
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