Better lucky than good
Posted by Michael.
Last month the VA managed to “lose” sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel. Somehow an employee was able to take home a number of files, and as if that’s not enough, they later reported that their house had been burgled and the laptop containing the files was stolen…
anyway, the laptop has been found and the FBI “has determined that the data base remains intact and has not been accessed since it was stolen.” More tests were planned, however.
“This has brought to the light of day some real deficiencies in the manner we handled personal data,” [gee, you think?]VA Secretary Jim Nicholson said. “If there’s a redeeming part of this, I think we can turn this around,” he said.
June 29th, 2006 at 9:03 pm Using
Yeah, this whole mishandling of VA data was more than just shameful, it was downright criminal. You gotta respect everyone’s privacy, but especially the personal info of our vets. In my book, by virtue of their sacrifices, they’re pretty much the last segment of the population you would want to wrong, through negligence or otherwise.
It’s like robbing from a church or something: there’s a special seventh-and-a-half circle of Hell for folks who do that sort of thing.
June 29th, 2006 at 9:06 pm Using
All that being said, I’m very happy to hear that it looks like nothing was actually accessed.
Maybe we need a (slightly) more efficient and at least somewhat vested bureacracy in charge of the VA. Don’t we have a lot of newly-retired generals circulating about? Seems like they’d be good choices to run the VA, since they’ll be looking after their former brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Maybe we could even further streamline things a bit by putting the VA under Defense? Maybe I’m just silly, but that sure seems like a natural association…