Ben Bain reports: The National Archives and Records Administration violated its information security policies by returning failed hard drives from systems containing personally identifiable information of current government employees and military veterans back to vendors. By agency policy, NARA is supposed to destroy the hard drives rather than return them, according to a top NARA…
Category: Government Sector
Government accused of ‘cover up’ over lost farmer tapes
The Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been accused of a “cover up” after two back-up tapes went missing containing the banking details of around 100,000 farmers. The tapes are said to have gone missing this spring, with Defra officials having been informed in July. The tapes were lost by contractor IBM,…
UK: Home Office – sensitive document blunders
5.4m of us apply for a passport every year and we relay on the Passport Office Service, a part of the Home Office to issue them. They say their mission is safeguarding your identity but Watchdog has received complaints from viewers who say that the Passport Office Service have made basic errors meaning that their…
Archives officials grilled on the Hill over missing data drives
Max Cacas reports: So, why can’t the National Archives hang on to its computer hard drives? That’s the question that the House Information Policy, Census and National Archives wants answered. Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Missouri), is chairman of the panel, a part of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The theft or loss of…
Military lags in safeguarding officers’ identities
Charlie Reed of Stars and Stripes reports on the military’s progress – or lack thereof – in addressing an August 2008 report by PublicResources.org that revealed that hundreds of thousands military officers’ Social Security numbers were publicly available in government and commercial databases, including the Congressional Record, W.S. Hein, LexisNexis, and Westlaw. It seems that…
Farmers bank account details lost by Rural Payments Agency
Caroline Stocks reports: Thousands of farmers’ bank account details have been lost by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) after the Government body lost two back-up tapes of confidential data belonging to all English farmers. The RPA, which administers the single payment system of EU subsidy to English farmers, for the Department of Environment Food and…