The Department of Defense plays fast and loose with the SSNs of DoD employees. It TALKS about the importance of protecting Personal Identity Information but fails to implement basic protections and procedures.
Ask yourself: Why does a large federal entity such as the U.S. Army or U.S. Navy use Social Security Numbers on an everyday basis to confirm the identity of personnel, when every individual already has a UNIQUE email address and UNIQUE identity card and UNIQUE username and UNIQUE office location?
Why does one giant-sized federal agency use an ID number FROM AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE FEDERAL AGENCY to confirm identities of its employees?
After getting signed up and signed in on the very first day of their career, there is ZERO NEED TO KNOW the employee’s Social Security Number. Yet Dod asks for these every day, and distributes millions of them to various back-end server systems. And according to news reports, one of these systems was hacked by a foreign power.
When I first went into the Army in AUG 1967 I was RA 128-——. Then sometime over the next year or so it was changed to our SSAN. Didn’t seem a good idea to me at the time, and doesn’t now.