Military lags in safeguarding officers’ identities

[unhappycamper]

Military lags in safeguarding officers’ identities
By Charlie Reed, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, November 2, 2009

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan - The military is playing catch-up on a year-old complaint that hundreds of thousands of officers’ Social Security numbers have been floating around on the Internet.

In an October 2008 letter to the Defense Department and the Federal Trade Commission, Public.Resource.org detailed its discovery of roughly 232,000 military officers’ Social Security numbers in government and commercial databases, available to anyone with an Internet connection.

The nonprofit group, devoted to making public records available online, found the numbers in the Congressional Record. Copies are available online and in print at libraries throughout the United States.

Carl Malamud, the founder and president of Public.Resource.org, estimates that 500,000 officers’ Social Security numbers were printed in the Congressional Record between 1971 — when the military began using them to identify troops — and 1996. Moreover, digitized versions of the federal publication have been available online for years.

But his complaint, addressed to military Inspector General Gordon Heddell, did not reach the Defense Privacy Office until August. The office is now in the process of ensuring the numbers have been redacted, both online and in print, director Samuel Jenkins said.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=65799