Gunner's Blog

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Navy said Friday that it was trying to determine how personal information on more than 100,000 Navy and Marine Corp aviators and air crew wound up on a publicly available Web site for more than six months.

In a fresh case of private information on military personnel being compromised, the full names and social security numbers of both active and reserve members appeared on the Naval Safety Center Web site at www.safetycenter.navy.mil last December.

Those affected are believed to include any Navy or Marine Corp aviator who has served during the past 20 years.

The same information was also disseminated late last year to Navy and Marine Corps commands on 1,083 program disks mailed out as part of the service's Web Enabled Safety Program.

The Naval Safety Center found out about the problem and removed the information from the web site Thursday, a week after the recovery of a stolen Veterans Affairs Department laptop that contained sensitive information on more than 26 million U.S. military veterans and service members.

The center is now recalling the mailed program disks.

As in the case of the Veterans Affairs laptop, the Navy said there was no evidence that any of the disseminated data has been used illegally.

But the service is notifying those affected by mail and setting up a 24-hour call center to handle queries.

Safety center spokeswoman Evelyn Odango said the problem appeared to be an errant file.

"The information was inadvertently included in a file that was then posted on the Web," she said. "We found out about it through a Web site user and it was removed immediately."

REUTERS Reut14:36 07-07-06

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This is the sort of thing that really frosts my testicles - the "Webmaster" of the Navy and CHINFO ordered FHTNC to cease sending USAFNS.com bona fide news releases about our Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard personnel.  The reason cited was "security". 

It reminds me of the Pink Panther movie wherein Inspector Clouseau (played by Peter Sellers) is on the sidewalk outside a bank hassling an organ grinder about his monkey, while the Bank is being robbed by armed bandits.  The parallel is that the powers "that be" are fiddling around with minor internet issues of no consequence while major problems are jeopardizing national security. 

See: http://www.usafns.com/cgi-bin/2005/09/introduction-and-index-of.htm - a diary of my efforts to reason with CHINFO.

Also See: http://www.usafns.com/searchgoogle.shtml for a simple study that proves that there are 10's of thousands of news releases about Navy and Marine Corps personnel.  The very same FHTNC releases that USAFNS.com was publishing earlier.

~Gunner