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Used government computers bought at auction filled with personal information

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Dissent

The 1980s called….

Scott Noll reports that a KHOU investigation “once again found the City of Houston selling private, personal information through online auctions of used government equipment.”

What did they find, you wonder?

“On one of the computers, we found a database containing over 100,000 medical records,” explained computer expert Gary Huestis.

They do not report whose computer that had been. In response to a tweeted query from this site, Scott Noll indicated that the computer the records were on came from Houston Airport System, but they were not sure of the origin of the records.

But the potentially damaging data left behind didn’t stop there. Huestis and his team found photos of driver’s licenses, checks, documents with social security numbers, personal pictures and videos, as well thousands of hours of audio recordings and emails detailing city security procedures.

This is really inexcusable, Houston:

Of the 38 computers Huestis examined, 23 still had hard drives inside. He found information stored on all but one of them.

“It’s not hidden, not encrypted, not formatted, it’s just there to be able to view,” Huestis said.

Read more on KHOU. There’s also a lot city security information that was on the auctioned computers.

Can we all say, “FFS, Houston!!”

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