The Seattle Times reports that his boss quit. The Wall Street Journal says he was fired.

In any event, at the end of business on Friday, 2 June 2006, the supervisor of data analyst who… misplaced… the personal data belonging to over 26 million veterans (including over 19 million Social Security Numbers) will no longer be employed by the Veterans Administration. Michael McLendon is done.

The VA’s inspector general, George Opfer admitted to House and Senate interrogators that:

  • a laptop was stolen from the employee’s home on May 3;
  • the purloined database consisted of about 5 gigabytes of data;
  • the hyper-sensitive file was on an unencrypted external hard disk, and;
  • Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson wasn’t told till May 16.

McLendon apparently didn’t bother.

Jim Mueller, the commander-in-chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was shocked by VA management incompetence and/or perfidy, “To not inform your boss of what can only be described as the worst crisis in the VAs history is unconscionable, inexcusable.”

Reasonable folks might ask how this guy was able to regularly walk out of the building with the keys to millions of futures for three long years without challenge… Or why he was also cleared to access the data remotely from home… Or why the VA couldn’t formally notify vets that their lives had changed overnight.

The answer to that last queston is easy. Opfer told elected officials, “We don’t have 26 million envelopes.”

Perhaps that’s why Mueller concluded, “These individuals cannot be trusted to fix what they allowed to happen.”

Mueller wants to see more heads rolling than one. With any luck, he’ll get his wish.

Blogger Captain Ed calls this incident another “great example of why we do not want sensitive personal information in the hands of civil servants. It’s not necessarily any fear of Big Brother, it’s the fear of Big Idiot Brother-In-Law.”

It’s not just the government. As Email Battles has long chronicled, your future is held in the slippery fingers of every entity that stores personal data, including credit bureaus, credit card outfits, universities, mailing list managers, banks, county recorders, and websites.

We should fear every Big Idiot Nosy-Data-Collector, whether government or not.

Meanwhile, to demonstrate just how serious this crime is, the FBI has put the Montgomery County Crime Solvers on the case:

$50,000 Reward Offered for Return Of Electronic Data Containing Veterans Information

Montgomery County Police are working with the FBI and the VA OIG (Office of Inspector General) in the investigation of a residential burglary that occurred on May 3, 2006, in the Aspen Hill community of Montgomery County. Taken during that burglary was a laptop computer and external hard drive which contained identifying information for approximately 26.5 million veterans…The primary objective of the investigation is the recovery of the laptop and external hard
drive.” [pdf]

Presumably, you can only turn the data in once for $50K… But then again, this is government work.

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