I've been opposed to a national ID card for some time now, and this is a very good reason why. How can we trust the federal government to run a national ID card system when Congress won't apply even basic security restraints to the way that the federal government handles information?
R. James Nicholson, the Veterans Affairs secretary, said Thursday that: "I am outraged at the loss of this veterans' data and the fact an employee would put it at risk by taking it home in violation of VA policies." On May 3, the unnamed employee's home was broken into and the database was stolen, Nicholson said. No encryption was used to protect the data.
The bill, called the Data Accountability and Trust Act, or DATA, establishes strict standards for commercial companies to follow in the event of a data breach--including notifying customers "as quickly as possible," posting an alert on their Web sites and picking up the cost of credit reports for one year.
Not one of those requirements would apply to federal agencies.
Let me spell it out for those of you who support the REAL ID Act and other proposals for creating a national ID card system. A significant amount of your personal information will be tied to your national ID card and the federal government is not going to have any meaningful responsibility to ensure that your information is protected from basic security violations.
The information that was lost by the VA employee was just the tip of the iceberg of how badly the public could be hurt by the way that the information privacy and accountability standards are moving. Unlike private businesses, the federal government can just collect whatever information it wants, when it wants to collect it. People cannot "opt-out" of government information storage. Would you want all of the information that the governments in this country have on you to be "protected" by a government that is unwilling to enforce security policies?
I am very suspicious of this VA scandal. There is absolutely no professional reason why the employee had to take that information home. His or her home is the last place where a backup of such information would take place, and even if they were a DBA or programmer, they would not need any of that information on their laptop to be able to do their work from home. It is very easy to just generate test database information for that kind of work, if the employee were a programmer, and if he or she were a database administrator it would be defenseless on every level.
Isn't it just a little too convenient that so many records were stolen the one weekend that the employee took home over twenty six million records? I think it was most likely an attempt to make a hell of a lot of money on the part of the employee.
I am so surprised...yeah, home was broken into...right...is anyone home?
No one was home where it counts--at the White House and Department of Veterans Affairs. What I want to know is what position this guy had that allowed him to get access to the database dumps in the first place.
I don't care. I have had federal ID cards for 28 years with no harm coming from it.
I have also had a SSAN for a little longer.
There are two relevent issues here. One is privacy the other is identity theft.
National ID enables positive ID (but does not completely prevent ID theft. And it does so at the expense of privacy.
The unanswered question is: how much privacy do you think you are entitled to? Only a moron would claim a right to annonymity in public.
It's not a matter of anonymity versus identiy, Roci. It's a matter of do you want every state to be royally f$%^ed by Congress not willing to hold these people accountable for data security violations that are elementary in how obvious they are.
Congress has a long way to go in terms of creating the prosecutorial infrastructure needed to make this thing safe for the public. I simply don't trust the federal government to do this if they have such low standards and regards for our personal information. Knowing how much information could be lost, I don't think it's a trivial matter.
King David got in trouble for "numbering" what he later realized were really God's people.
Bush thinks those who take his mark are "his" people; those of us who have already "chose[n] this day whom [we] will serve" will never take the Damned Mark of another god. David repented; I've seen no sign of such in any of the Criminals in the District thereof.
(And roci, 28 years isn't long enough to make any informed commentary. Read the rest of the Book first... ;)
A lot of people won't even think about the problems inherent to this on the secular side. If you have all of the databases accessible to a cop with your national ID card, that means that the government databases have all been normalized so that they share at least one common entry point. From there, anyone who can break into them or steal them can easily join them together in a logical way using simple SQL commands.
That's the part that I think people like Roci tend to miss. The national ID goes beyond a mere federal ID to tying a lot of stuff together that probably shouldn't be tied together.
MikeT - There are a few people who will just inherently resist being branded, tracked (and ultimately led to slaughter) like cattle, but not many; certainly not enough.
They will always trade liberty for a little temporary security.
The only ones who will resist with all they have - once they are no longer able to buy or sell otherwise, and it gets "really hard", are those who know Who they must serve.
There are enough corrupt third and second world countries that I think we could easily afford to get seek refuge for a while should that come to pass in our lifetimes.
Great minds...
(just make sure we do it under His mighty hand...)