A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter from my bank. Like most letters from banks it was not a good letter. It said:

We have been notified that a large merchant may have inadvertently made your confidential card number and card information available to others due to a security breach.

Naturally they did not identify this merchant so I have no way of avoiding them in the future. Nor did they tell me how many "others" this information was suspected of being shared with.

This came on the tails of a major banking information theft, so I was hardly surprised to have fallen victim myself. In that incident over 200,000 accounts were compromised.

But this did surprise me:

The Veterans Affairs Department announced today that a computer containing personal, identifying data for as many as 26 million American veterans has been stolen from a VA employee's home. ~ Government Computer News

Twenty-six million?

And this administration wants us to trust that they can secure records of our phone calls and Internet browsing? They can not. The only way to secure this data is to not collect it in the first place. To believe otherwise is not only foolish, it is dangerous.

General Michael Hayden does not understand this concept. The only thing he understands is the SIGINT credo: "In God we trust. Everyone else, we monitor." Knowledge is power in his world, and might makes right.

Labels: General Michael Hayden, Information Security, tia