Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Politics

Agency put Social Security numbers on Web

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 21, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Social Security numbers of 63,000 people who received Agriculture Department grants have been posted on a government Web site since 1996, but they were taken down last week.

Free credit monitoring is being offered to those affected.

The security breach was noticed last week and promptly closed, the Agriculture Department and Census Bureau announced Friday.

The department data that included Social Security numbers were removed from the Web on April 13 and similar data from 32 other agencies were taken down Tuesday as a precaution, department spokeswoman Terri Teuber said. "There is no evidence that this information has been misused," Teuber said.

A review has determined that none of the other 32 agencies had a similar problem, said Sean Kevelighan, spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget.

The breach was discovered by Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill. "I was Googling my farm name at 11 p.m. when I couldn't sleep," she said in a telephone interview, and details of her land loan came up in the second listing of the Google search, a private Web site that reposted the government data.

The next morning, April 13, she contacted the Agriculture Department, her congressman, Rep. Tim Johnson, the private Web site and the Census Bureau.

Chris Hoofnagle, a lawyer at the University of California at Berkeley law school clinic on technology, said the only federal law violated by such a breach is the Privacy Act, but the Supreme Court had ruled last year that victims could collect damages only for measurable losses to ID thieves, not merely for anxiety.

[Last modified April 21, 2007, 02:42:15]