General
Loss of Data
This is mainly directed to my friends on the Ohio Right-of-center bloggers: Stop demagoguing this issue.
This is not Ted Strickland’s fault. If Blackwell won in November the lefty bloggers would be jumping all over this and blaming Ken, and we would be howling.
OK It might be Ted Strickland’s fault if and only if:
He personally reviewed the backup procedures of this particular state contractor while having knowledge of Best Practices in the IT industry.
His campaign committed to overhauling state bureaucracy.
To my knowledge neither of those apply. So we judge him on the response and the rest is just the usual big organization SNAFU. The above article had a lot more detail that sheds light on what happened.
Strickland announced Friday that a backup tape, described as a storage device, was stolen June 10 from the unlocked car of a state intern who had taken it home for safe-keeping.
The governor repeated today that there is no evidence the tape has been accessed, and that doing so would be highly unlikely because of the knowledge and equipment needed.
The practice of rotating a tape to someone’s house is also not uncommon as the services of a professional outfit like Iron Mountain don’t come cheap. However, the person that takes the tape home probably should not be a 22 year old who leaves it in the car overnight, or whatever it is that happened.
It’s probably an LTO or LTO2 tape, which are the most common in the field right now. The important thing is that your average person outside the IT industry couldn’t identify an LTO tape if their life depended on it. The other thing is that the drive needed to read a backup tape of this sort costs thousands of dollars.
And not only that but it would be helpful to figure out what backup software was used to extract the information from the tape. The tape wouldn’t do anything for the average thief and the chances that this info got out is vanishingly small. The only real danger is that the thief who took it watches the news, realizes what the tape is and is then able to fence it to someone who knows how to extract the data and sell it.
Strickland’s news conference made it more likely that this scenario may happen, if you want to criticize him on that angle, fine by me.
Discussion
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Reading this I had a thought - would it be possible to “watermark” this type of data - for example introducing a few bogus records, nonexistent citizens with email addresses that are accessible only to law enforcement - or some other ploy to actually let the owner know that the information is being used? Obviously you could simply wait until somebody’s ID has been stolen, but by then it’s a much bigger problem. Is it possible to “bait” data in such a way that it would leave obvious evidence if it was ever used?
Agreed - it’s virtually certain that this was stolen by somebody who had no idea how to access the info much less put it to use.
And if you know anything about IT, you know it’s really an impossible standard asking somebody like the governor to be directly responsible for this type of thing.
I think the point that most of us in the righty-sphere have been trying to make is that Strickland himself criticized the Bush administration for the Veterans Affairs information getting stolen in a similar manner… And let’s not forget all the hoopla that the leftys made out of Blackwell’s SOS office and the social security number fiasco.
I think the thing to consider is that Strickland and the lety-spehere are trying their hardest to make this out to be something good…and it really isn’t.
Is Strickland responsbile? No more than Blackwell or the Bush administration was…
Dave;
I agree with your point; however when it comes to politics all is fair game, although I would respond in a like manner not choosing to go down this road.
Secondly, this only denotes the problem with big government at every level. Our governments, whether local, county, state, or national are becoming too big. Its time we identified what role each is to play in our lives.
Lastly, I am 100 percent against REAL-ID and this is one more example as to why the Department of Homeland Security plan to consolidate the entire nation’s personal data in one system is a recipe for disaster.
The real issue is that our government is ill-equipped to deal with the growing business of hacking and identify theft. We are more worried about 10-20 ragheads causing a little mayhem that the billions of dollars lost yearly through system compromises and economic espionage. This is the real threat
[...] This incident has little to do directly with either Ted Strickland or the Democratcs. See also this post from yesterday from NixGuy. Bookmark | Trackback [...]
[...] agreeing with NixGuy’s take up to this point, I decided not to deal with the state data-theft story because it seemed like an [...]
You raise a very valid point on the topic of at times creating a larger problem when news like this is released. I understand the reason for it to have to be reported but it also does create a situation where less news would be safer. I’ve wondered the same things when there have been media articles pointing out flaws in safety/security, feeling as if all else was needed was a big flag, “Yoohoo terrorists…try this!”.