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VA Data Theft Included Active Duty Info
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-06-07
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Personal information on almost 80 percent of the United States' active military personnel also resided in the digital media stolen from a Veterans Affairs analyst's home.
It wasn't bad enough that the flaunting of VA data policies allowed private data on 26.5 million veterans of the armed forces to be placed in a position to be stolen. Now the Washington Post reports that details about active duty members of the military were part of the stolen data.
An article posted at the DefenseLink News web site said a comparison of data between the VA and the Department of Defense revealed more than data on veterans vanished with the May 3rd burglary:
Initial findings from VA indicated the personal information on about 50,000 active duty, National Guard and Reserve personnel may have been involved.
As the two agencies compared electronic files, VA and DoD learned that personal information on as many as 1.1 million active-duty servicemembers, 430,000 National Guardsmen, and 645,000 members of the Reserves may have been included in the data theft, according to today's release.
DefenseLink noted that the VA receives records for all new military personnel, including the National Guard and Reserve, since those personnel are eligible for certain VA benefits.
To date, there have been no reports of the stolen hardware or the missing data surfacing. There has been fallout from the theft, as the Post reported:
The 60-year-old analyst, who had been taking home sensitive data for at least three years without authorization, has been fired, officials have said. His boss resigned last week and another senior VA official is on administrative leave pending investigations by the FBI, the VA inspector general and Montgomery County police.
A coalition of veterans groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government yesterday, contending that privacy rights were violated and seeking $1,000 in damages for each affected veteran.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, demands that VA fully disclose who was affected by the theft, and asks a court to prohibit VA workers from using sensitive data until safeguards are in place.
The prospect of the missing information being misused poses a threat beyond identity theft and credit abuse.
"This essentially can create a Zip code for where each of the service members and [their] families live, and if it fell into the wrong hands could potentially put them at jeopardy of being targeted," David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in the Post.
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Tag: Veterans Affairs
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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