Do Something To Change Information Security, Privacy and Compliance...Contact Congress!

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I, along with a very large number of other bloggers, writers and instructors, often pick apart data protection and privacy laws and regulations, and point out how certain portions of them are infeasible for most organizations to implement, and talk about the types of laws that should be inacted to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and privacy. But how many of us actually do something about it and contact our lawmakers to communicate this information?

I don't do it nearly enough. I will sometimes send a message to my U.S. senators, but I need to do it more. That is on my list to improve upon in 2008.

Do you know who your lawmakers are? In the U.S. you can go here, enter your zip code, and viola! You will have a list of the elected officials for your state, along with their contact information.

Unfortunately, many of them do not provide an actual email address, but force you to write to them via a web form. However, if they read it, then it is worth your time to write your concerns along with suggestions for improvements.

You can also send the same messages via postal mail if you want to increase the probability it will actually get in front of their eyes. I like to put "I AM YOUR VOTING CONSTITUENT" on my envelopes and messages as a way to catch their attention.

What is neat about this site is that most (possibly all) of the elected officials have a "soapbox commentary" where you can write your message to them for everyone visiting their site to see. However, I'm not sure the elected officials even view this site regularly, if at all.

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

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