Be forewarned: I will not allow the comments section for this post to be used as a political platform on Obamacare. Comments about whether government should consider past breaches or problems in awarding government contracts for jobs involving personally identifiable information are welcome.
Jaikumar Vijayan reports:
Two of the contractors involved in developing the Affordable Care Act healthcare exchanges have had fairly serious data security issues, a Computerworld review of publicly available information has found.
The incidents involving Quality Software Services (QSS) and Serco are not related to the ongoing glitches in Healthcare.gov, the ACA’s troubled website.
Even so, the information is relevant in light of the ongoing scrutiny of the companies involved with the problem-plagued exchange.
Read more on Computerworld.
Vijayan cites the Serco breach in 2011 that affected 123,000 participants in Thrift Savings Plan. Serco was alerted to the breach in April 2012 by the FBI. But that’s not the only breach involving Serco in recent years that Computerworld could have cited. In May 2010, Brian Krebs reported that a laptop with unencrypted information on 207,000 Army Reservists was stolen from Serco’s offices in Reston, Virginia.
For QSS, Vijayan points to a government audit by HSS that found that the firm failed to adhere to federal government security standards in delivering, what appears to be unrelated, IT testing services for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
By now, regular readers are familiar with the oft-repeated theme that no company or entity is immune to data breaches. And I wish people screaming about ACA and the risk of security breaches would also take a very hard look at – and audit – the massive database system being used for student data and sharing of student information. But did the government pick its contractors for this job wisely? Is this one of those situations where we say, okay, they had a problem, but everyone has problems sooner or later, and now they’re more aware and are unlikely to repeat the same problems? Or should the nature of past breaches be held against firms as a warning flag that a firm might have future problems?
And if critics are going to use past history of breaches to limit government contracts, then why has SAIC continued to receive lucrative government contracts despite its history of some serious or big breaches? And why, one might ask, is USIS still doing background checks for government positions?
Do we need a three-strikes policy for government contracts? Or should it be two-strikes or one-strike? Or shouldn’t we hold past problems against a contractor seeking a government contract at all? The latter seems to be pretty foolish, but what, if any, should the limits be?