U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security Makes 14 Privacy Impact Assessments Available

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I am a huge proponent of privacy impact assessments (PIAs); basically risk assessments for privacy. PIAs can reveal gaps in privacy practices, along with the information security practices used to protect privacy. They are important and effective exercises for all organizations that handle personally identifiable information (PII).

Yesterday a Government Computer News (GCN) article, "DHS bares upgrades to immigration, travel databases" reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made available 14 PIAs for projects that "collectively contain tens of millions of personal records concerning immigration and travel."

These PIAs reportedly go beyond the IT issues; they address the privacy impacts related to paper, spoken and other non-IT PII.

I have not yet reviewed the PIAs, but I plan to. Reviewing PIAs not only give you important information about the actions being done to preserve privacy and how to perform PIAs, they also help to demonstrate good privacy practices, reveal poor privacy practices, and demonstrate due diligence.

These DHS PIAs could serve as great case studies for your information security and privacy awareness and training programs.

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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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