Agriculture Department Exposes SSNs
Friday, April 20th, 2007 | Justin Bugajski
Came across an article in the New York Times describing the latest occurrence in the growing trend of private consumer information being inadvertently or purposely exposed on the internet. Now, due to obvious concerns about identity theft, millions of government dollars will have to be spent to monitor all these folks’ credit reports. Even worse than that though, is how many places this database has been copied which are completely outside of the agency’s control.
The Agriculture Department said that its review of the database shows that between 100,000 and 150,000 people could be at risk.
Privacy advocates say the actions by the agencies may not be enough. The database is more than two decades old, and is used by many federal and state agencies, by researchers, by journalists and by other private citizens to track government spending. Thousands of copies of the database exist.
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