A tax return preparer from Macon, Ga., pleaded guilty Thursday to filing a false claim for tax refund, theft of government money and aggravated identity theft, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue (IRS) announced. According to court documents, Willie C. Grant is a former tax return preparer who used many of his former clients’…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
ABA: Lawyers Must Implement Reasonable Data Security for Client Information
Back on August 2, in response to yet another breach involving a law firm’s records, I wrote to the American Bar Association to ask what the ABA advised members in terms of disposal of records. I got a pro forma response that was totally non-responsive to the question I had posed to them. I wrote…
Defining Reasonable Security
Tracy Kitten writes: Last month, an appellate court in Boston reversed a lower court’s ruling that favored a bank in a legal dispute over a 2009 account takeover incident (see PATCO ACH Fraud Ruling Reversed.) Was that appellate ruling fair? Based on the security practices that most banking institutions used in 2009, probably not. The case…
OR: Hacking cases down, still a threat: by the numbers
Some interesting stats in a news report by Queenie Wong in the Statesman Journal: Cybersecurity by the Numbers Since 2009, state agencies have been required to report the number of suspicious information security incidents to the state’s Enterprise Security Office, which is part of the Department of Administrative Services. All incidents are not necessarily considered…
Data breaches up 19 percent, GAO reports
Federal data breaches jumped 19 percent last year, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday. There were roughly 13,000 incidents reported by agencies in 2010 involving unauthorized disclosures of personally identifiable information — last year, that figure shot up to 15,500, Greg Wilshusen, GAO’s director of information security issues, told the Senate subcommittee on government management…
Recent Developments — Both in the Courts and in Congress — on the Scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Orin Kerr writes: I’ve blogged a lot on the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and specifically on whether using a computer in violation of a computer use policy or Terms of Service is a federal crime. I’ve been banging the drum urging courts to adopt a narrow interpretations of the Act for a decade,…