June 23, 2006
Something Bugging You?
Something bugging you? Yes. Your friendly government is at it, once again. This time they have their noses deep into your bank records. May I make a suggestion? If you were planning to contribute to Al Quaeda, don't write a check. That probably holds true for any contributions you make to the Democratic National Committee and The American Civil Liberties Union as well .
It's a comfort to know that they take such good care of the data they already have.
In all, five government agencies have reported data theft, including the Veterans Affairs Department, which on May 22 acknowledged losing data on up to 26.5 million veterans. Among them:- At the Agriculture Department, a hacker who broke into the computer system, obtaining names, Social Security numbers and photos of 26,000 Washington-area employees and contractors. Victims will be offered free credit monitoring for a year after the break-in in early June.
- At Health and Human Services, personal information for nearly 17,000 Medicare beneficiaries may have been compromised in April when an insurance company employee called up the data through a hotel computer and then failed to delete the file.
- At Energy, Social Security numbers and other data for nearly 1,500 people working for the National Nuclear Security Administration may have been compromised when a hacker gained entry to its computer system last fall. Officials said June 12 they had learned only recently of the breach.
On Thursday, a House panel was cautioned that credit monitoring alone may not be enough to protect Americans whose names, birth dates and Social Security numbers were compromised at the hands of the government.
"The worst-case scenario is that the veterans file finds its way to a public distribution source, such as the Internet," said Mike Cook, a co-founder of a company specializing in data breaches."If this happens, the stolen identities will lose their connection to the VA data breach and groups of fraudsters might actively trade that data among the fraud community," he said. "More people might have access and could misuse those identities on a grander scale."
Let's see, they have records of our phone calls, our banking transactions, our internet searches, and, just in case they haven't covered all the bases, they have greater access to our homes. (Notice how much press coverage that Supreme Court decision got)
But I don't have to worry because I'm not doing anything wrong. Am I?
Photo note: Courtesy of the creative folks a PaperSource who filled their windows with bugs, in honor of spring.
Addendum: Cheney's displeasure We must be onto something.
Posted by Dakota at June 23, 2006 07:59 AM