25 Million Social Security Numbers?

I presume you have seen the story about the Veterans Administration employee who managed to bring home and have stolen a database with 25 million veteran's social security numbers. The scale of the databases we have today, and how portable they can be, has become a real issue. Years ago, it would just not be reasonable for us to carry such a database in such an easily transported/stealable database. The amount of damage that can be done by one boneheaded move is really amazing. Are you careful with the data you bring home to work on?

Even more freightening is the thought of government workers acting as the stewards of a database that might contain information on something like two b>trillion phone calls. While the phone database was initially targeted at finding terrorists, how many of us use a database for only the one thing that caused it's creation? It will be interesting to see what happens with the phone call database.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 09:11 AM  Permalink