My information is likely in the dump, due to some contractor work I did back in 2003-2005. My best guess is the leaked passwords are the passwords needed to de

My information is likely in the dump, due to some contractor work I did back in 2003-2005. My best guess is the leaked passwords are the passwords needed to decrypt the most confidential portions of the security clearance questionaires, which was (is?) distributed as a DOS binary. The protected data generally contains people's deepest darkest secrets, and information on where to begin digging for more information that could be used to blackmail them into working for a foreign power. This information is collected in order to estimate how succeptable the applicant would be to blackmail, but is also the perfect starting point for starting a campaign to blackmail current security clearance holders into spying for a foreign power. At least the way it worked in 2003 was that a security officer emailed you an old 16-color DOS application called EPSQ 2.2. As I remember, the application actually saved its data back into the binary, so people wouldn't be confused about what to email back to the security officer when they were done. The EPSQ questionaire had two sections... one contained some basic data that your employer needed to see, and one contained drug use, alcohol abuse, mental health, financial problems, legal problems, etc. You picked two passwords that were used to encrypt the two sections, filled out the questionire, and emailed it back. You then gave the less sensitive password to the security officer. I don't remember if I sent the more sensitive password to the OPM or if EPSQ 2.2 contained public key crypto/obfuscation so that the OPM could recover the sensitive information encryption key. In any case, the human-picked password/encryption key most definitely could be used to decrypt the most sensitive data (blackmail information) in order to facilitate saving a partially completed questionaire and finishing it up at a later date. These days, I really hope EPSQ is a web app that's accessed via a binary with a single TLS certificate authority hard-coded (and using perfect forward security), so copies of super-sensitive data aren't left in several mail queues protected only by (generally low-entropy) human-generated encryption keys.