U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Evan Korth <korth () cs nyu edu>
Date: April 20, 2007 7:22:10 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers

Dave,

I hope you are feeling well.

Here we go again.  See clipping below.

e.

Evan Korth
Clinical Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
New York University
-----------------------------------------------------------------------


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/washington/20cnd-data.html

WASHINGTON, April 20 . The Social Security numbers of tens of  
thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance  
from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in  
a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft  
and other privacy violations.

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which  
maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social  
Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were  
notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the  
database on the Internet.

.I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what  
was out there,. said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms  
in Fairmount, Ill.

The first link that appeared in the search results was for her farm.s  
Web site. The second was for a site that she had never heard of,  
FedSpending.org, which provides a searchable database of federal  
government expenditures. The site uses information from the Census  
database.

Ms. Bergmeier said she was able to identify almost 30,000 records in  
the database that contained Social Security numbers.

----snip----


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