Saturday, June 03, 2006

Do You Know Who I Am?

Why not? Enough of my personal information is available to strangers that there is no privacy left. Two weeks ago I wondered what else was being hidden from us, now we know part of the story. I doubt we will ever know the whole truth and they will do their best to keep as much of the damage undercover as possible.
IDs of active personnel on stolen laptop - Yahoo! News:Personal data on up to 50,000 active Navy and National Guard personnel were among those stolen from a Veterans Affairs employee last month, the government said Saturday in a disclosure that goes beyond what VA initially reported.

VA Secretary Jim Nicholson said in a statement that his agency discovered after an internal investigation that the names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth of up to 20,000 National Guard and Reserve personnel who were on at least their second active-duty call-up were "potentially included."

In addition, the same information on up to 30,000 active-duty Navy personnel who completed their first enlistment term prior to 1991 also were believed to stored on the computer laptop and disks stolen from a VA data analyst at his Aspen Hill, Md., home on May 3. {...}Veterans groups have criticized the VA for a three-week delay in publicizing the burglary after the May 3 theft. Last week, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press showed that the stolen data in many cases included phone numbers and addresses of veterans, as well as 6,744 records pertaining to "mustard gas veterans" — or those who participated in chemical testing programs during World War II.

On Saturday, Nicholson said there was no evidence that information for other active-duty personnel had been breached.

He said there have been no reports that the stolen data have been used for identity theft but wanted to alert the public about the VA's findings out of an "abundance of caution" in what has become one of the nation's largest security breaches.
Since nobody in this administration is a veteran I doubt if this will receive more than lip service.

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