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State Agency to Destroy Unauthorized USB Drives

Posted by Zonk on from the what-they-don't-know-won't-hurt-you dept.

Lucas123 writes "The State of Washington's Division of Child support has forced hundreds of workers to turn in personal USB flash drives and has instead begun issuing corporate-style USB drives. The goal is to centrally monitor, configure and prevent unauthorized access to storage devices. So far about 150 common drives have been issued. The agency eventually plans to destroy all existing thumb drives collected as part of the security policy change."

4 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Misleading summary by jlowery · · Score: 5, Informative
    The article states that the previous drives were "independently purchased" by employees, which likely means they got permission to buy a drive, went to Staples to get it, and then were reimbursed by the state. That would mean that they are not "personal" USB drives.

    I know... I apologize for reading the article.

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    If you post it, they will read.
    1. Re:Misleading summary by damsa · · Score: 4, Informative

      They are "personal" drives as opposed to "enterprise" drives in the sense that the state issued drive has additional features not available to the regular Staples consumer.

  2. Sensible policy by MosesJones · · Score: 4, Informative

    Before people moan about "personal" these aren't things that people have paid for with their own cash (they got the cash paid back). The other point is that banning removable storage is a difficult, but sensible, policy when there is confidential or valuable information about. Hopefully these USB sticks will be encrypted and tied to only the departmental machines (i.e. no working at home on confidential information) in order to prevent misuse or sale.

    This isn't a personal privacy issue for the users (after all its just a USB key) its a personal privacy issue for the people on whom the department stores information.

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  3. Re:Misleading Summary leads to Misleading Tags by CTachyon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Now some geniuses have tagged it privacy - what does the state erasing a thumb drive it owns have to do with privacy?

    RTFA. The reason the state is issuing these new fancy-schmancy thumb drives is that the new ones (claim to) have 256-bit AES encryption and (claim to) self-destruct after 10 consecutive wrong passwords. They're doing this whole switch because of privacy, because the thumb drives contain the private, personal case files of hundreds/thousands of citizens.

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