The Obama administration’s continuing multi-billion dollar screw ups in cyberspace are creating public panic.
It would be natural for people suddenly cut off from EBT cards paying for groceries to feed hungry families, to panic.
Lost in this latest denial to the poor and needy is the fact that the Barack Obama administration is hopelessly lost--somewhere in cyberspace.
First came Healthcare.gov, whose site had to be shut down when it couldn’t be accessed by John Q. Public signing up for ObamaCare, then came the technical glitches which sparked 10 fiery explosions over 13 months at NSA’s newest and largest showcase data storage facility in Utah.
Although it’s reported back up and running this morning, this weekend it was the food stamp debit-style EBT cards rendered useless for people in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.
System failures across the land seem to be Obama’s latest scandal.
“At about 9 a.m. Saturday, reports from across the country began pouring in that customers’ EBT cards were not working in stores. (CBS Boston, Oct. 12, 2013)
“At 2 p.m., an EBT customer service representative told CBS Boston that the system was currently down for a computer system upgrade.”
Why was there no warning issued ahead of time? Why did people have to find out their cards didn’t work as they tried to have their groceries run through the cashier at the supermarket?
The American government has lost its control in the cyberspace world, or is at least pretending to.
Senators and representatives don’t have to turn to relatives and friends to feed hungry families when their EBT cards fail.
This is the emailed statement explaining the loss of EBT card access from Xerox spokesman Jennifer Wasmer: “While the electronic benefits systems is now up and running, beneficiaries in the 17 affected states continue to experience connectivity issues to access their benefits. Technical staff is addressing the issue and expect the system to be restored soon,” Wasmer said. “Beneficiaries requiring access to their benefits can work with their local retailers who can activate an emergency voucher system where available. We appreciate our clients’ patience while we work through this outage as quickly as possible.”
It may be “connectivity issues” to government bureaucrats, but to people whose EBT cards have been put on hold, it’s more than inconvenience, it’s hunger.
Only an emergency could have caused a sudden maintenance exercise of EBT, and maintenance that forces card holders to leave carts of groceries behind at the supermarket is proof positive that the system isn’t working.
This is a government whose members have no trouble getting through when they take to Twitter to take on their enemies, and a government whose members inundate the email boxes of the people it supposedly serves on an almost daily basis, asking for “just $5 more”.
The Obama administration’s failure in the IT world is either stupidity or sabotage.
Either way, it’s a failure that hurts real people.
While Barack Hussein Obama is out there talking about the Fundamental Transformation of America, someone should take his computers away.
Judi McLeod——Bio and Archives
-- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
