What Were They Thinking!? U.S. Marshals Put The PII of Thousands of People on a D.C. Street For Anyone To Take
I read a lot of articles about incidents; it is hard to keep up with them all! However, one I ran across on the WUSA 9News Now site in Washington D.C. grabbed my attention.
It appears that U.S. Marshals emptied the offices of a business being evicted for nonpayment of rent of all the contents earlier this week because they were behind in their rent. They took the
business' computers, boxes of personal information including Social Security numbers and tax records of the business clients, and just left them out on the street during the evening earlier this week. By morning it was all reportedly gone.
Duh!
The U.S. Marshals obviously
1) Do not have good procedures for removing the contents of buildings and facilities during evictions
2) Do not have any information security or training awareness about how to handle sensitive information
3) Did not perform common sense actions for the handling of computers and personally identifiable information (PII)
Evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent is one thing, but to then put the PII of thousands of people at risk by leaving it out on the street for anyone to take is completely inexcusable.
It is scary to think how many times similar types of situations may have occurred.
Email This!
Digg it!
Sphere it!
Del.icio.us
Reddit!
Newsvine
Comments
Wow...There is nothing like having the government pull this kind of action off. While I understand the fact that it is not the marshals' jobs to sort the items for personal information but there should have been communication that goes with companies who may have PII stored so that those items may be put in separate location an cost to the company who is being evicted.
Posted by: Michael | April 2, 2007 1:12 PM
Yes, I agree the storage should be another charge to the convicted company.
The marshals need to have training to know how their actions impact others beyond just the evicted company. They should have procedures to put computers and printed documents into locked storage and, yes, then charge the evicted company with the storage costs.
Even though it is more work for the marshals, one of their responsibilities is protecting the public, which encompasses protecting the PII they come across. Putting it out on the street was thoughtless and inexcusable.
Posted by: Rebecca | April 3, 2007 2:04 PM