Newswire:

Bad News: You’re Sick. Worse News: You’re Not The Only You Anymore.

Someone, it seems, stole a laptop from the National Institutes of Health. And now a couple thousand patients are at risk for identity theft. [Washington Post]

On the laptop: seven years-worth of sensitive info on 2,500 patients who’d been involved in a clinical trial. Names. Medical diagnoses. Heart scans. The works.

Oh, and in violation of government policy, none of the info was encrypted.

NIH officials found out about the theft a month ago but decided not to tell any of the affected patients of the security breach because they didn’t want to alarm anyone.

Sound familiar? Almost the exact same thing happened when a laptop was stolen from the car of a V.A. official a couple of years ago, putting thousands of veterans at risk for identity theft.

In fact, there been a string of these security breaches in government offices. A Government Accountability Office study this month found that out of the 24 federal agencies that were reviewed, at least 19 had left Americans’ personal information at risk of being stolen.

The Treasury Department reported the most incidents (340 incidents), followed by the Commerce Department (295 incidents). In one case, an IRS employee reported a missing computer drive a month after he had last seen it. [Washington Post]

In January, the Transportation Security Administration put up a website for passengers mistakenly placed on the No-Fly List to petition to get their names off. The site wasn’t encrypted, nor was it on a safe government domain. [CRN]

And in 2006, a computer hacker was able to steal data on 1,500 people from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Weapons Program. Oh, and security codes too. [MSNBC]

Keep this in mind the next time the government says “yeah… trust us…” and wants to read your e-mails or record your phone calls.

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