News Links
Photos
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Lack of Data Security in the Navy
There is a great hullaballoo in the news about a stolen laptop and disks containing information on veterans and active duty service members such as names, SSNs, birthdates, etc. At least one civilian employee has been fired for having this information at home. Until my retirement on December 31, 2004, I was a civilian employee of the Navy. Before I retired from the Fleet Hometown News Center, Norfolk, Va., my position description (PD) contained a critical element requiring me to create and maintain off site computer backups for disaster recovery purposes. No safe or other secure location was provided for the storage of these offsite backups--I just took them home. The backups contained personal information (names, SSNs, birthdates, names and addresses of parents, etc.) on more than 200,000 active duty Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard personnel as well as the entire news release system and other related databases (Casualty, Command Information, Media, Hold Files). When I retired, my bosses collected my keys to the building, my ID card, and they even scraped the DoD base stickers off my car. Absolutely no one asked for the 30-plus offsite backups I had at home--material that I was REQUIRED to have at home. I always destroyed the excess copies monthly and the remaining disks were cut in two and tossed in the trash shortly after my retirement.
I cannot help but wonder if the fired employee(s) were under similar circumstances where they were required to have the information off-site.
Betty N. Bashara
Norfolk, Virginia
![[USAFNS.com atom.xml link]](http://www.usafns.com/weblog/images/atomfeed.gif "Click to view Gunner's Blog Atom feed - atom.xml"){kind=small}
![[USAFNS.com rss.xml link]](http://www.usafns.com/images/rss.gif "Click to view Gunner's Blog RSS feed - rss.xml"){kind=small}