Who Wants To Be An Oregonian?

Anonymous Coward writes "TheOregonian.com is reporting that an identity theft ring was caught with ownership of a set of CD's which contained records on every registered driver (~2.5 million people) in the State of Oregon. With all the calls for identity smart cards, federal databases, and better connections among existing state databases, this story should provide a real warning for the abuse such systems invite...by both criminals and the government itself...the records are actually for sale to 'approved' companies like news organizations and banks. The full story can be read here on yahoo as well."

Comments

This happenes all the time.

[Savage-Rabbit]

A friend of mine bought a used PC for his mother. When he booted the thing up it turned out to have windows already installed. So he clicking around and found a nifty Icon. He clicked on it and wouldn't you know up pops this window which turns out to be a database interface to several thousand Patient profiles for the whole region where he lives. Turns out the Local Health center had sold off some mustered out PC's and forgot flatten the Hard Drives first. That is how easily this happenes.

This sort of thing will allways happen and especially if you hand this sort of information over to private companies. Information will become more easy to access and governments and corporations will abuse it. They regard it as an incontestable right. Just wait till they start putting genetic profiles into these databases and selling them to insurance companies, banks and employers for "Risk Management and Customer/Employee evaluations" Won't it be fun to have your dirty genetic secrets floating around for the public to scrutinize.