From The WaPo:
Personal data on 3.3 million people have been stolen from the company that guarantees student loans in Virginia and two other states, authorities said.
The theft occurred last weekend at the headquarters in St. Paul, Minn, of ECMC, which has been the designated federal student loan guaranty agency in Virginia since 1996. The nonprofit company also guarantees loans in Oregon and Connecticut.
Information that was taken included names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers, ECMC said Friday in a news release. It said no bank or other financial account information was taken.
“This is old-fashioned” theft, rather than any form of computer hacking, Paul Kelash, a spokesman for ECMC, said in an interview.
The news release said the theft involved “portable media with personally identifiable information.” Kelash declined to describe the object taken or to give other details of the theft. “All I can say is that it is a portable media device,” he said.
Oh, yeah, that’s comforting. Someone didn’t have a crappy online security system in place, they just let someone walk off with a thumb-drive with your personal information on it.
Question: Why the frak is that information on a thumb-drive, or any type of “portable media”, in the first place?!
Ladies and gentlemen, this will be what’s going to happen to your medical records in a few years thanks to ObamaCare.
Cross-posted at “I’m Surrounded By Idiots” and On The Right.
Filed under: Health Care
Didn’t this *already* happen in VA? The state branch of Big Brother keeps all our prescription info, and it got stolen and the hacker tried to extort $$ from the state. (Perhaps someone can find a link…)
But you are right, that whole info gathering for the so-called ‘comparative effectiveness’ raises the possibilities to a whole new level. My thought is a state law to require every individual’s electronic medical records to be encrypted, with the PATIENT holding the decryption key! Somebody needs to see my records, they request the key directly from me. If I don’t think they need to see, they don’t see. Include substantial penalties for circumvention.
Here you go:
http://www.valawyersweekly.com/weeklyedition/2009/05/25/warner-touts-e-medical-data-despite-hacker-attack/
http://www.imsurroundedbyidiots.com/2009/05/26/mark-warner-certainly-isnt-the-brightest-in-re-online-medical-records/
The last one is shameless self-promotion on my part.