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Social Security Numbers on Public Display
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by Jordan Yerman | April 20, 2007 at 05:26 pm
807 views | 5 Recommendations | 1 comment
This is precisely the sort of thing that technophobes are right about: mismanagement of digital information. When issued with a social security card, one is told to keep it in a safe place. However, once that number is converted into ones and zeroes, apparently all best are off.
The Agriculture Department for years publicly listed Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received financial aid from two of its agencies, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations.Officials at the department and at the Census Bureau, which maintains the database where the personal information was listed, were evidently unaware that it contained Social Security numbers. The problem was reported to the government last week by a farmer in Illinois who stumbled across the data 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 in the results was to the Web site of Ms. Bergmeier’s farm. The second was to a site that Ms. Bergmeier had not heard of, FedSpending.org, which has a searchable listing of federal government expenditures. It uses information from the government 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.”
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 19:00 on April 20th, 2007
so much for quality control - seeing how info looks on a the screen etc...
BUT, how secure is SS numbers anyway? Aren't they required form amny situations to are 'in the wild' so to speak?
at 21:45 on April 20th, 2007
jordan, you've convinced me you've done the work - it's authentic. I also think that you've been fair and thorough. I didn't get the sense that you were hiding your biases, or passing off other's work as your own. Or worse -- getting paid by those you cover -- so it's transparent and independent. I also think you deserve praise for being an eyewitness, and for your investigative efforts. Good stuff.