Identity Theft and Government Security Breaches
Our government will keep our personal information safe from identity theft.
If you believe that statement, I have a nice bridge for sale - cheap….
Unfortunately, our government isn’t doing a great job to protect us from identity thieves. It’s been almost two years since millions of our veteran’s names, SSN and birth dates were made available in a huge security breach. You’d think they’d have learned a lesson from that, but I guess there’s just too much red tape needed to actually get the ball rolling in Washington to implement tighter security.
The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative branch, has found that most of the federal agencies haven’t put federal recommendations about protecting our identities into play. One of those recommendations was just better file encryption. The wheels just keep turning very slowly if at all.
In an effort to make the public more aware of identity theft, the post office did a mass mailing in February 2008 to all households. Everyone got a little FTC brochure titled “Deter - Detect - Defend - Avoid ID Theft”. That was probably easier to mail that out than to tighten up their security measures. On the back page of the brochure are listed common ways ID Theft happens. They left out security breaches.
Besides the Feds, our local governments need to tighten up on security measures, too. The Davidson County Election Commission Building in Nashville, TN lost 370,000 registered voter’s info in a break-in on 12/28/07. On the same day, the US Air Force lost a laptop with info affecting 10,501 active and retired Air Force members and the Minnesota Dept. of Commerce lost a laptop with info on 219 identities.
Actually, there’s so many security breaches happening all the time, keeping up with them is a full-time job. The best website to track security breaches is PrivacyRights.org.
So if you’re thinking you’re safe from identity theft because you shred, protect and have totally secure passwords, you’re mistaken. Doing all these things is great and helps a lot to protect yourself from identity theft. We aren’t the only ones with access to our info. It’s out there and like Pandora’s Box, we can never get it contained again.
Take proactive steps to protect yourself from identity theft. Any victim of this devastating crime can tell you horror stories of what they went through to repair their credit and get back their good name.
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