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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (58424)	4/20/2007 4:29:04 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

"We're from the federal government. We're here to help you." Federal Database Exposes Social Security Numbers Article Tools Sponsored By By RON NIXON Published: April 20, 2007 WASHINGTON, April 20 — The Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations. Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet. “I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill. The first link that appeared in the search results was for her farm’s Web site. The second was for a site that she had never heard of, FedSpending.org, which provides a searchable database of federal government expenditures. The site uses information from the Census database. Ms. Bergmeier said she was able to identify almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers. “I was stunned,” she said. “The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access.” While there was no evidence to indicate whether anyone had in fact used the information improperly, officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau removed the Social Security numbers from the Census Web site last week. Officials at the Agriculture Department said Social Security numbers were included in the public database because doing so was the common practice years ago when the database was first created, before online identity theft was as well-known a threat as it is today. Department officials said that more recently, when government agencies began to review public databases to remove sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers, they failed to notice that the numbers were being used in this database. Terri Teuber, a department spokeswoman, said the agency was notifying people whose Social Security numbers were disclosed on the site. She said the agency was also planning to contract with a company to monitor the credit reports of all the affected individuals, at an estimated cost of about $4 million. “We took swift action when this was brought to our attention, and took the information down,” Ms. Teuber said. “We want to make sure that it doesn’t exist on any publicly available Web site.” The Agriculture Department said that its review of the database shows that between 100,000 and 150,000 people could be at risk. A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau referred all calls about the database to the Office of Management and Budget. Privacy advocates say the actions by the agencies may not be enough. The database is more than two decades old, and is used by many federal and state agencies, by researchers, by journalists and by other private citizens to track government spending. Thousands of copies of the database exist. ( continues... ) nytimes.com Uh, this isn't Rush Limbaugh. This is the NYT.

To: Sully- who wrote (58424)	4/20/2007 4:30:53 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Reid Must Resign And Another Thing . . . The Mark Levin blog Attacking Alberto Gonzales is like clubbing a baby seal. He's weak. He was always weak. He was weak when he served as White House counsel. He was weak when he was confirmed by the Senate for attorney general. And he was weak during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. Now, before there was Gonzales, there was John Ashcroft. He was always strong. He was strong when he served in the Senate. He was strong when he was confirmed by the Senate for attorney general. And he was strong when he testified before the 9/11 Commission. They said he had to go because he was strong. Everyone knows what's going on here. The Democrats, who started this, want Gonzales's head on a stake as another supposed example of administration corruption. They want the public to believe that the firing of these eight U.S. attorneys is the equivalent of Watergate. These are the same Democrats who defended Janet Reno to the end despite real malfeasance, including the Elian Gonzales disaster, the WACO massacre, and the deadly expansion of the legal wall between the CIA and FBI. In comparison, Gonzales is Oliver Wendell Holmes. But Republicans have had enough of him. They see him as incapable of defending himself, let alone advancing a conservative agenda. And they hope to replace him with someone more to their liking, which will never happen given this Senate. In the big scheme, none of this matters, and the public could care less. The president’s ratings aren’t affected by this. This is an inside-the-beltway manufactured scandal. (By the way, I say this as someone who has never been impressed with Gonzales, Harriet Miers, and so many of the people the president holds close.) Far more relevant, consequential and disturbing is the behavior of the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, who by word and action is actively undermining our fighting men and women in Iraq. His legislative efforts to starve our armed forces in the middle of a war are as contemptible as anything I’ve witnessed in my 25 years in Washington. And yesterday he made a statement that was so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War. The difference, of course, is that Reid is the highest ranking Democrat in the United States Senate. For those who are so pre-occupied with Gonzales that they may not have heard it, this is what Reid said yesterday: "I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week." So, Reid announces to our brave volunteers that their country is sending them to a lost war. And he announces to our enemy that victory is within their reach — just keep up the killing a little longer. During my radio show last night, I received a call from a Gold Star father. He was outraged by Reid’s comment. He has called before and has become a good friend. But I’ve never heard him as angry and frustrated as he was last night. Rather than join the chorus demanding Gonzales's resignation, let me be the first to demand Reid's resignation. And let's see how many pundits, conservative and otherwise, will join me. levin.nationalreview.com