Posted on 06/23/2006 7:43:39 PM PDT by baseball_fan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Trade Commission, responsible for protecting Americans from fraud and identity theft, reported on Thursday the theft of two of its own computers with personal information about 110 people.
The incident was the latest in a series of recent thefts and data breaches involving government computers.
The Veterans Affairs Department said last month an external hard drive containing information on 26.5 million veterans was stolen. The Energy Department discovered personal information about 1,500 employees and contractors was compromised in a cyberattack, and the Agriculture Department said a hacker may have obtained data about 26,000 of its workers.
The FTC laptops belonged to staff attorneys who were using them to prepare an enforcement lawsuit, said Betsy Broder, the FTC assistant director for privacy and identity protection.
The computers, which were password-protected, contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers and some financial account numbers. The laptops were stolen from a locked vehicle last week.
"We wish this hadn't happened," Broder said. "No data security is perfect and we're going to use this as a way to improve our practices and security."
The FTC sent letters to the 110 individuals notifying them of the theft and offering one year of free credit monitoring.
The FTC is developing a new laptop computer security policy that would require an employee to remove any personal identifying information in the machine before it leaves an agency office. If the personal data was needed for an investigation, an FTC manager would have to approve allowing the laptop to leave the building, Broder said.
(Excerpt) Read more at today.reuters.com ...
What the hell is going on?
"VA, Energy Dept, USDA, now FTC... are we being cased?"
Maybe they're just trying to get a little PR for the national ID card. You know, so it won't go down so hard. That's just the cynical me talking.
My husband, who works as an auditor for the State of NY said he rec'd an email the other day saying some NYS employees' info had been compromised in a similar way. Not his, thank God. The email said the personal info had not been encrypted, but they were taking steps to do so. Yeeha. Too late.
Hillaryn is broadening her database.
It is called incompetence. How do you lose a laptop with sensitive information on it? You leave it sitting in a terminal while you go to the rest room. You leave it unattended in an unlocked car. The big question is how many clearances have been revoked because of mishandling of sensitive information? These laptops don't just walk off on their own. Someone has to leave them in an unsecured area for them to be stolen.
Things such a this to be rather common, recently.
I can remember as a boy in the late 50's in our small town where people could leave their keys in their cars on the street and their homes unlocked and nothing would happen to them. Later there were TV ads that implied if you left your keys in your car you were contributing to juvenile delinquency. Did taking one's car keys out and locking their front doors eventually solve it? As a society, no.
Our freedom is being slowly eroded to where we are being forced to increasingly play defense and be on our guard at all times. Somehow imho that burden needs to be shifted off law abiding citizens' shoulders and onto those elements who think they can betray the common trust.
One would not raise their own child this way to where the only way to trust them is to lock everything up. Neither as a society if we are to protect our liberties can we allow this standard to become the norm for others.
/soapbox off :-)
bump
Give a headache, sell an aspirin.
This is what I was talking about the other evening on a different thread about the theft of a laptop choc full of data on tens of thousands of veterans.
Notice that IF the personal data was required in an investigation, it can leave the building in the laptop.
Typically an audit team, or investigative team, may have a legitimate need to keep the membership SECRET from everyone else in the agency. The "closed shop" operations favored by Washington DC IT people leave such operations NO CHOICE. In fact, they may very well be running audits or investigations on the IT people.
The solution is better encryption methods that are user friendly but effectively keep outsiders "out"!
Your typical top level IT manager is loathe to spend money on such "frivolity".
I think the only way we can protect ourselves from these guys (the IT managers) is to prosecute one of them for having forced investigators and auditors to resort to independent personal data methodologies for the purpose of doing their jobs.
I named my candidate for prosecution.
Well said.
Bump
If it's so important that this data be on a laptop outside the building, then they gotta start chaining the laptop to the guy's wrist like in the old spy movies.
Amen to that. This is nothing new--remember when the State Dept had a bunch of laptops stolen during the Clinton admin?
"What the Hell is going on" here is a scam. There is no way that this number of people rise to this level of incompetence. Our personal data is being stolen at an unbelievable rate, make no mistake about it.
Yes they did and if only the American people knew how lax the "security". I always marvel at the fact that one of the questions in the interview for a clearance is whether or not one has belonged to an organization or group that advocates the overthrow of the US government. D.C. is filled to the brim with people who have active Top Secret clearances that openly express such sentiments. I overheard a couple libs with clearances openly wondering why the people haven't revolted against President Bush. I still remember after 9-11 in the moments after when the dust had not yet settled when a government civil service worker was expressing that "we deserved it". I let it slide at the time because I assumed he was just a blowhard and not worth the time. Now the whole Democratic leadership has been infected with this idea. All of Washington needs scrubbed clean of the Anti-American attitudes. I personally believe that people who don't love this country should not be working in the federal government in places with access to information that pertains to national security.
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