Homeland Security Department Not So Secure

Last week the Transportation Security Administration had lost a computer hard drive containing data and payroll information for about 100,000 employee records. They use the term lost, but seeing who is involved in looking for it, stolen is probably the better word choice. They may find it being used as a bookend somewhere.

The data was on employees who worked at the agency between January 2002 and August 2005 and included Social Security and bank account numbers, names, dates of birth, salaries, benefit deductions, and bank routing information.

In case you don’t recall, the TSA is a part of the Homeland Security Department. That does not sound reassuring at all. The agency that was chartered after 911 to protect us is not even protecting itself.

But if you look at a short chronology from the last 3 weeks you could not make up this entire string of events that has just rolled out of our elected government.

- April 23, 2007 The President’s Identity Theft Task Force – Combating Identity Theft a Strategic Plan – 120 pages of what Washington wants everyone to do

- April 2007 Government Accountability Office – Privacy – Lessons Learned about Data Breach Notification – 78 pages of how and when to notify people the next time it happens! They were planning on it!

- May 4, 2007 TSA notifies 100,000 of a lost hard drive

- May 9, 2007 The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), along with four security screeners, charged that the TSA had recklessly violated the Privacy Act and also violated the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. The class action suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on Wednesday 5/9/07.

President Bush has to be in the White House banging his head on the oval office walls. He would ask Attorney General Gonzales, but he has his own issues to worry about, and he issued that 120 page report, so he’s off the hook. So who else can take responsibility for this? Typical reaction is to roll a head or two in the management ranks. What does that solve? It only keeps the same inept individuals still guarding the data, which they didn’t do so well to start with.

What really needs to happen is people who are truly responsible for this, at the office level, get fired, loose their pensions drain their 401’s. If you were handed information and told your financial future depended on keeping it safe, you can be sure there would be people keeping better track of that data better than their wallet.

Lack of accountability breeds lack of responsibility.

President’s Identity Theft Task Force

Last week Washington released a 120 page manifesto about all the ways identity theft is affecting all of us. A little late to the table? The Bush administration made mention of it briefly in 2003 and I believe they became preoccupied with a bigger fish called Saddam.

Well now that he’s fertilizer, they can get back to what’s on the minds of the American people. So it took them four years, and significant year over year increases in this crime ever since, for them to return to the topic.

This action is a result in the uproar being made by the public and this being covered by media all of the time, especially when a major data breach occurs.

Lost in all this public reaction is the fact that people are still engaging in high risk behavior when it comes to protecting their identity, and many still feel it will never happen to them. No amount of legislation will help them until people start helping themselves. At the end of the day the best defense is self defense.

We can’t expect the government to stop all of the gaps so we can continue as in the past leaving ourselves wide open. They can only protect you so much, the rest is up to you. You must realize that it is individuals (not the government or businesses) who will lose the most and suffer the biggest hardships financially and emotionally from this type of crime.


If Identity Theft continues to grow, as it has in the past few years, it will eventually start to have a major economic impact and the federal government is foreseeing this as very real possibility in the very near future. Statistically we all stand a good chance of getting impacted by identity theft; it will be the ones who have built up the best defense who will be impacted the least.

Don’t wait for it to happen to you!