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USDA Red-Faced Over Leak of Social Security Numbers |
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Written by Vanessa Bale
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Monday, 23 April 2007 |
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been left red-faced over the latest privacy violation incident where Social Security numbers of over 63,000 farmers have been posted on a government website.
All the farmers had received loans from various government grants. More astonishing is the fact no one realized that the Social Security numbers were up for public viewing for more than a decade until an Illinois farmer reported it to the government two weeks ago.
Though government officials removed the list of numbers immediately, the matter was not made public for nearly two weeks since they wanted to make sure that all the mirror sites had also deleted the list. The USDA released an official statement, accepting the full responsibility of the fiasco.
"We take full responsibility for this and offer no excuses for it. We took swift action when this was brought to our attention, and took the information down. We want to make sure that it doesn’t exist on any publicly available Web site", said Terri Teuber, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Marsha Bergmeier, who is the president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, stumbled upon the list when she searched for her farm on Google. While the first link was her farm's website, Bergmeier was curious to see a link for FedSpending.org, a website that she had never visited.
"I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there. I was stunned. The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access", she added.
When asked why was the list published for public viewing, government officials said that this was the practice followed years ago when online identity theft was not heard of. They added that the database was created nearly two decades ago.
An internal review of the database has shown that as many as 100,000 to 150,000 people could be at a risk of identity theft. However they assured that there have been no instances of misuse of the Social Security numbers.
"There is no evidence that this information has been misused. However, due to the potential that this information was downloaded prior to being removed, USDA will provide the additional monitoring service", Teuber said.
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