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Veterans' Personal Data Heisted
By John
Veterans' ID Theft may be largest ever.
The VA disclosed this week that the personal information — mainly from veterans discharged since 1975 — was stolen from a midlevel employee's home in what appeared to be a routine burglary.The material included the veterans' Social Security numbers, birth dates and in some cases a disability rating — a score of between 1 to 100 on how disabled a veteran is. The agency declined to say whether additional information regarding the nature of the disability was disclosed.
I like the Democratic Underground's theory better:
Can you tell that I think this is much more sinister than some clerk stealing some records? The clerk is a cover story and is probably a CIA/NSA plant. This very coincidental with the recent CIA/NSA head resignation/nomination events.
The story is serious and I shouldn't laugh but....heh.
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My understanding is that it's all veterans who were ever discharged in or after 1975, and all veterans who were discharged before 1975 who ever applied for any VA benefit, and some spouses; I've called and asked about dependants and parents, and gotten "I don't know" for answers.
If my tinfoil hat wasn't securely attached, I'd think that this was an attempt to eliminate the SSN as an identifier, requiring the adaption of some new "Universal Identification Number".
Easier to believe that someone was foolish.
From what I can tell, my records were probably lifted. Why would anyone in the intelligence community give a shit about my VA records? Waiting 9 months for an eye appointment does not make for exciting reading. If it weren't so entertaining we could all chip in and get all the members of the DU tinfoil hats because those yahoos will believe anything.
You have to wonder about the poor security at the VA that allowed the guy to copy such a batch of data to a laptop in the first place. Their system is a piece of crap if it doesn't prevent that kind of wholesale copying of data to an unsecured device. (There is No-Such-Thing as a secure laptop.)
The way this has been presented on the news, every hour today, as an alert on all networks, I smell a sting operation here.
Maybe the stolen laptop with disk containing all that information is real, but consider the sheer size of the data involved first. Some hard drive in that laptop, man.
Before someone pipes up and says that it would be possible to store that many datapoints on a laptop hard drive they would first have to prove what data and what kind and what amount per veteran before having any reasonable place to stand. Plus the number of veterans involved.
More likely scenario:
*Somebody stole a laptop.
*It has something on it but we don't know what that something is at all.
*Might contain some lists with veterans names on it in there.
*Most laptop thefts are for quick turnaround to purchase drugs. Someone else has the laptop now.
*If that someone else has not scrubbed the disk, might be a worthwhile sting to make them think that they have something big to peddle on that disk. Might smoke both them and the laptop out of the woodwork.
My laptop is secure, Barb, there is such a thing as disk encoding. My HP also only responds to my fingerprint although I'd bet there's a way around that for the tech savvy, but not the streetcorner types. The gummint should be using the technology but, you know. And the VA is not exactly high tech although it should be.
Let us pray,
And I would just love to know the political affiliation of that VA worker who supposedly copied the info in the first place, wouldn't you?
Since they are only on "administrative leave" and haven't been hung out to dry, I'm fairly sure there is not an R on their voter registration card...
Maybe the stolen laptop with disk containing all that information is real, but consider the sheer size of the data involved first. Some hard drive in that laptop, man.
I dunno about that. If it was just a table dump of only the fields mentioned in the article it shouldn't be more than 512 bytes per record, including padding and indexes. That's about a gigabyte per 2 million records, so a typical 60 gig drive with 40 gigs free could hold 80 million records. We've got a million soldiers in the Army and in a typical company about one fifth of the people are ETSing any given year, so I'd say we should be sending 200,000 soldiers to VA every year... 200 grand times 30 is 6 million. Add in the other services which probably aren't as big as the Army, I'd guess at 12 million muldoons listed there.
Now, granted, I'm pulling most of these numbers out of my ass, but unless I'm off by an order of magnitude, it's not implausible.
And I would just love to know the political affiliation of that VA worker who supposedly copied the info in the first place, wouldn't you?
The VA is an entitlement farm; of course they're all Dems there. They're more justified than most but it's true all the same.
The best part from the DU post had to be the warning to "look out for dead men voting."
What is up with the Left? Is reality just not bizarre enough for them that they have to imagine boogeymen?
If they would open their eyes, they would find what is out in the world very satisfying to their needs.
The conspiracies and lies allow them to ignore the daily difficult that life offers I guess.
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The stupidity of the left wing continues to amaze me, and they want to be in charge of the country? That will be the end of America. I've always told people that i would live to see a shooting civil war in the United States. I'm 65 and truly believe i will make it. What a slaughter, well trained, well armed, x military conservatives against a bunch of sniveling cowards.