Tuesday, May 23, 2006 26.5 Million Veterans' Info Stolen Personal info on 26.5 million US veterans was stolen from an employee of the Dept of the Vets Affairs who took the data home w/o authorization, exposing them to possible identity theft. The computer records included names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for the military veterans and some spouses, the dept said. The electronic data related to everyone discharged from the military since 1975. Lawmakers and vets' advocates expressed alarm that the govt failed to safeguard the data, which could be used in credit card fraud and other crimes." What? Identity theft? Oh don't fear... Att Gen Abu Ghraib Gonzales said: "We have no reason to believe at this time that the data has been exploited for identity theft." Well, besides the fact that the draconian '05 Bankruptcy Bill that the GOP couldn't support enough doesn't allow for a person to declare bankruptcy if they are victims of ID theft, here's the eye- popping statistics on ID theft: According to 2 studies done in '03, approx 7 million people became victims of ID theft in the prior 12 ms. That equals 19,178 per day, 799 per hr, 13.3 per min. Average losses of ID victims = $17000. Oh yeh... no need to worry here. Yet another example of BushCo looking out for vets... after bending them over yet again. |