Okay, I’m taking a couple of summer courses at the moment and am not finding much time to write or post at Incredible Fukn.us However, that being said, I am taking a class that requires me to read the newspaper every day and write a short summary/ critique/ journal about it…Ah ha! Yes, I’m going to post my homework for you guys to read. Enjoy. The first one is about the recent theft of my identity information.
As a veteran of the USMC in 1990-1994, I was surprised to see that the State Department allowed an analyst to take home a database containing the personal information of 26.5 million Veterals. Basically, every living veteran.
This seems to be an incredible bounty for the robbers and in my suspicious mind, I am forced to raise several questions about the event itself. The first is, why would they put so much information on one database? The database must be huge to contain such a a huge dataset and I am surprised that it all fit on one laptop. Is it a coincidence that the analyst lived in a building where several robberies had recently occurred? That, of course, is the key question. At a time when the Bush administration is pushing immigration reform , when the conservative government is touting the benefits of a national ID card, is it a coincidence that such a large base population would be compromised? To me, this seems an ideal scenario for manipulationg a segment of the population which is accustomed to taking orders as the means to discard the cumbersome ssn system and begin a more secure national ID card program. Coincidence? I think not.
Yeh, my ID info was in there too then, apparently. Wonderful news.
Interesting conjecture as well. That was the first thing I wondered about
when I saw this story, why the hell did this guy bring this stuff home?
Maybe he personally had some designs on selling it or something.
There is no such thing as a “secure” database.