Broker to Limit Sale of Personal Data (Schumer gets Cheney, Paris SS#s)

Washington Post
Broker to Limit Sale of Personal Data

By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page E01


One of the nation's leading brokers of personal data on millions of Americans said yesterday that it will restrict its sale of individual Social Security numbers amid growing public worries about privacy.

Westlaw, which provides data to government agencies, law firms, companies and other organizations, said corporate clients will no longer have access to Social Security numbers, and government offices other than law-enforcement agencies will now be able to get only partial numbers.

Westlaw was not involved in a series of recent security breaches that resulted in identity thieves obtaining personal records of more than 175,000 consumers. In a new case announced yesterday, for example, Boston College warned 120,000 of its alumni that hackers had obtained access to their personal information.

But Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) embarrassed Westlaw by holding a news conference last month to demonstrate how easy it was for his staff to use the company's service to obtain virtually anyone's Social Security number, including those of Vice President Cheney and celebrity heiress Paris Hilton....

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The changes come as consumer concerns mount over the security of personal information and the little-known and largely unregulated data-broker industry that has boomed in recent years. Personal information is used for many things, including marketing, checking creditworthiness and verifying identity for homeland security....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45443-2005Mar17.html

people breaking into her email, now her SS#, one could feel bad for this girl being made the goat all the time if she weren't such a spoiled, air-headed, nitwit publicity hound by her own right

....just kidding. and she is.

eom

... as an Internal Auditor (Fortune 50 corporation) once upon a time. I sat down and did a very minor hack into the Executive Compensation systems and provided the CFO and Controller with their salary data (including SS#, etc.).

They didn't like it. The (incompetent nincompoop) Director of IT liked it even less and was chased into a posture of claiming that I was an extraordinarily talented and skilled technician - very rare in the industry. (I damned near soiled myself in laughter.)

I had a similar situation... I had to remove people's accounts from the company gear if they were "terminated", and was once forwarded a list of terminated employees (during the quarterly company "downsizing"), the entire list of everyone's salary-- all the way up to the CEO. I didn't even have to hack, they just saved it as part of their spreadsheet mistakenly.

They gave me all sorts of ammunition.

Genius, really.