BlogWood: MT Archives

You have no privacy

This is just one more good reason to fear the massive accumulation and trading of one’s personal data for profit.

For the second time in less than a month, a large national data broker has revealed that thieves stole the identities and private information of thousands of Americans.

Reed Elsevier Plc, the British owner of information company LexisNexis, disclosed Wednesday that hackers slipped past computer security and stole the passwords of its business customers in February to break into the computer database at its Seisint division in Boca Raton and, in turn, swiped the personal information of 32,000 Americans.

The Seisint computer breach was detected when employees found abnormal billing activity by some of its business customers. After sneaking into the system, the thieves peeled off with names and addresses, and in some cases Social Security and driver license numbers. No personal credit or medical records were pilfered.

Seisint stores tens of billions of personal records on millions of Americans in Boca. That personal information is sold to corporations, individuals and government entities for employee background checks, debt collection and other purposes.

After learning of the breach, LexisNexis notified the Secret Service, which investigates counterfeiting and cyber crime. The company plans to notify individuals by mail over the next few days that their personal data was stolen. Residents in all 50 states and Puerto Rico are affected, but the company wouldn't provide a state-by-state count.

The computer break-in marked the second time in a month that it was revealed thieves made a mockery of the intense security measures at a large U.S. data broker, and both companies have major computer centers in Boca Raton.

Earlier in February, ChoicePoint, an information giant based in Alpharetta, Ga., with 300 to 400 employees here, acknowledged that thieves had taken sensitive data on 145,000 people, including 10,000 Floridians. In that instance, 750 people around the country were defrauded when their personal information was used for illicit purposes.

The latest theft spurred Sen. Bill Nelson into action. Nelson just voted for cloture on the federal Bankruptcy Bill, thus screwing average consumers everywhere by helping to ensure the bill’s eventual passage. He actually tried to add an amendment to exempt identity theft victims from the harsh aspects of the bill, but his amendment, like other attempts to add even a token amount of consumer protection to the legislation, was killed by the GOP majority. For some unfathomable reason, Nelson voted for cloture anyway. This feeble attempt to weasel his way back into the good graces of consumers is nowhere near enough.

Warning that the theft of thousands of personal records from Boca Raton-based Seisint is merely the latest in a growing threat to people's identity, Sen. Bill Nelson urged the Senate to promptly place the information broker industry under federal regulation.

The security breach at Seisint, a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier's popular LexisNexis information service, means that as many as 32,000 Americans "could possibly be the victims of identity theft," Nelson, D-Fla., said Wednesday in a speech to the Senate.