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Government Expects You To Trust It With Your Data

The IRS suffered a breach and upwards of 100,000 people had their tax returns stolen (or accessed?). The information taken contains enough data to commit identity theft. Name, address, social security number and bingo, someone else is masquerading as you and ruining your credit.

This comes on the heels of the White House and State Department breaches.

The Government believes that Russian hackers are responsible for all of the data breaches.

Does it matter who did it? I mean, it matters so they can try to find the culprits and possibly arrest them but the reality is the damage is done.

The government wants you to do everything electronically from filing taxes to signing up for Obamacare. It is also requiring medical records be electronic.

Imagine what information hackers could get from medical records…

The government is not capable of protecting you or your information. It talks a good game but time after time we have a breach and the typical response is they are sorry and will offer credit monitoring.

This does not solve the issue of lax security from agencies that are supposed to have cyber security experts. Breaches will continue because agencies do not care about masses of people whose names they do not know. It will continue as long as an atmosphere of politics envelops the culture of an agency that is more concerned with doing what is politically expedient (or motivated) rather than what is right to do.

Perhaps the government should be required to pay any person affected by a breach $10,000 and that money should come from the operating budget of the agency involved with NO increase in taxpayer funds to the agency or to cover the expense. If a BILLION dollars came out of the IRS budget for this breach it might feel more compelled to do what is right and protect our data.

Then again, this is the agency that can’t keep emails, attacks political opponents and illegally gives taxpayer information to connected people for political use.

They just don’t care, now do they?

We need to start firing people when this happens and we can keep firing and hiring new folks until someone gets it right.

The government collects tons and tons of data on each and every one of us. That data is vulnerable even though they are obligated to protect it.

Keep that in mind when government tells you it needs to collect even more of your personal information…

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

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