Cotton Mather in the VA
This is almost too easy. An employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs took a little work home with him, a data file containing the particulars of 26.5 million veterans including their social security numbers and disability status. A burgler broke in and tossed the house, taking among other things, a laptop and external drive on which the data file resided. link.
Let's put some perspective on this: that 26.5 million file covers ALL the veterans in the United States. Every single person that has ever served in the U.S. military just had themselves exposed for identity theft. That's 13% of the adult population in the U.S. Including me, because I'm a veteran.
With the information contained in that file, a crook could easily apply for and probably get a credit card in the veteran's name. Maybe a driver's license, probably a passport. Every veteran in the United States. It's mind-boggling that one guy could have all of that sensitive information on his laptop. The fact that the computer was stolen was irrelevant.
So does anyone think that this is an isolated incident? That the one guy who happened to have the one master file happened to forget and bring it home and accidentally got ripped off? Seems unlikely, doesn't it? I suspect that this was the culture at the VA, that people treated this information cavalierly and casually, not taking any security seriously.
So what should happen? First off, in true Cotton Mather style, we should have a witchhunt. Time to make an example. Someone, perhaps from the Justice Department, should go into that department with a blazing torch and teach bureaucrats not to take their trust so lightly in the future.
Secondly, these agencies need to practice good computer security. I can't imagine how a person should have been able to access all of that information, let alone casually stick it on a laptop. How about some computer security specialists in the department?
Thirdly, GAO or someone needs to publish a set of penalties for this kind of behavior, starting with fines, continuing through suspension and culminating in being tied to a stake, having piles of government regs heaped about their feet and being offered the ritual last cigarette.
Posted on May 23, 2006
