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FEMA Data Breach Hits 2.5 Million Disaster Survivors (cnn.com)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) unlawfully shared the private information of 2.3 million hurricane and wildfire survivors with a federal contractor that was helping them find temporary housing, an inspector general from the Department of Homeland Security said Friday. The data includes "20 unnecessary data fields" such as "electronic funds transfer number," "bank transit number" and addresses. CNN reports: FEMA said it began filtering the data in December 2018 to prevent this information from being shared, but a more permanent fix may not be finalized until June 2020. "Since discovery of this issue, FEMA has taken aggressive measures to correct this error. FEMA is no longer sharing unnecessary data with the contractor and has conducted a detailed review of the contractor's information system," said Lizzie Litzow, press secretary for FEMA, in a statement.
"To date, FEMA has found no indicators to suggest survivor data has been compromised. FEMA has also worked with the contractor to remove the unnecessary data from the system and updated its contract to ensure compliance with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cybersecurity and information-sharing standards. As an added measure, FEMA instructed contracted staff to complete additional DHS privacy training."
"To date, FEMA has found no indicators to suggest survivor data has been compromised. FEMA has also worked with the contractor to remove the unnecessary data from the system and updated its contract to ensure compliance with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cybersecurity and information-sharing standards. As an added measure, FEMA instructed contracted staff to complete additional DHS privacy training."
Between Equifax leak and all the other well-known bullshit. Why in this time and age don't we get more protection and leeway for identity theft?
At least half a dozen of my family members are dealing with fallout from this. They can't open bank accounts or get loans because some scammer has illegally used their information. So far we're in months, maybe years to clean this up, if ever. What the actual fuck is going on here and why hasn't the government with all its funds we send it, done anything about the situation. Too much profit?
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about stealing credentials for those poor people. Yeah I'm going to get a negative bank account and an SSN with bad credit associated.
How many screwups WITH ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY will it take for people to understand that the US government sucks at everything. And the bigger it gets, the worse it does.
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Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
City, state and federal privacy laws over data collection, networked data sets going back decades.
To connect photo ID with gov/private sector ID, bank accounts
Sanctuary city data protection for decade after decade of illegal migrants.
People using fake and shared US citizenship. Fake education and fake professions. Criminals who have no past.
Data sets that kind of look like that of a real US citizen but are used by a criminal/someone who needs that fake ID.
A government would have to link city/state/federal database sets and "discover" all the fake/shared ID creation and use.
For that everyone would have to have a bank account, photo ID, to show citizenship.
It wold be a very easy US wide database to set up and then add people to.
The why not is political. Someone political is protecting everyone using the fake and shared ID in states and cities and don't want to see that detected federally.
Too much would be discovered. The who and why of that city./state political pressure not to secure US banks, photo ID and citizenship.
The federal pressure not to allow state and cities more access to federal data sets about US citizenship.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Technologically, it's such a simple solution. You create something like a limited database view, you expose it on an API, and you give API keys to the people you want to be able to query it.
This is trivial technology to us, but to the people actually doing the work, the more likely scenario is that one person gives another a USB key with a giant Excel spreadsheet containing all the details of every person involved.
Why is it so hard for us to communicate to them that we know how to effect communication in ways that limit exposure of sensitive information? Why does it so often come down to some dumbass passing a .xlsx to some other dumbass? I have done so many consulting jobs where I have received mountains of inappropriate data, and I just ignore it, because what else am I gonna do? I mean, ethically. Obviously, some people just sell it.
How do tech people who do shit like this, and other shit like store passwords in plain text, still have jobs, after so many years?
your turn
Private government contractors getting unnecessary access to citizens info is nothing new. The post world war two building boom that made the Trump empire in New York millions also rated potential tenants. They took it a step further with the addition of the letter "C" to indicate undesirable tenants. It would be interesting to see if the private contractor did anything similar with the information so that their potential customers could be rated as to suitability for further sales. Companies that hand out cash for rebuilding or coordinate rebuilding can do all sorts of things with core credit information.
Without adequate oversight it is inevitable that we can wind up with assholes like the Trumps sucking away at the public purse to get rich.