09 June 2006

The Letter

I get letters from the Veteran's Administration, which is nothing unusual. Millions of former service people do. Every couple years I hear about the status of my claim. I saw a doctor last year to clarify a written statement I made the year before that, and expect they will notify me of a decision, maybe next year.

I know now that the real mission of the VA is to outlast us all, and looking at the life insurance actuarial tables and the size of the national debt, I think it might be a closer contest than it once was. But I am still betting on them.

So I was only moderately surprised to get an important-looking envelope in my box yesterday. There was a black text box, right above the address, with words all in caps: “ENCLOSED IS AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM THE SECRETARY OF VETERANS AFFAIRS. DO NOT THROW AWAY!”

My first inclination was to drop it immediately into the big trash barrel in the lobby, but I thought better of it. I did want to see what Secretary Nicholson had to say about the theft of my personal information.

I have been down this road before. A company I worked for kept data relating to the employee stock program on a couple computers that went missing from an unsecured office. They were very embarrassed, or perhaps the attorneys told them that they were potentially vulnerable to lawsuits over the disclosure.

Accordingly, they responded forthrightly, informed the workforce, and set up a special credit monitoring service free of charge for a full year.

It softened the blow, a bit, and gave a little peace of mind about who was doing what with our credit.

That is not the case with the VA. After all, it is the government, and the problem is super-sized. The story has been all over the news, but here are the unsettling specifics:

An employee of the Department apparently took information on veterans and others to his Aspen Hill, Md., home for the last three years. He had a laptop computer hooked up to an external hard drive. On it was stored the name, social security number, address and disability rating of at least 26.5 million people who served in the military since the 1970s.

The specific data he stored on us is more information than I was required to give under the Geneva Convention if I was captured.

With all the embarrassment, naturally the VA was reluctant to tell the whole story, and it has come out in dribs and drabs. It wasn't just veterans who were compromised, it was also information on around 50,000 spouses, though they don't say which ones. And much of the 2.2 million active duty force is apparently included, since enlisted soldiers technically are veterans, discharged from service for a couple seconds between the consecutive enlistments that make up a career.

There has been quite a struggle to put a good face on the theft. The police say it was just a “routine break-in,” whatever that might be. I always take it personally when I get robbed and it is never routine.

The cops also made a point of offering amnesty at a local middle-school, implying the theft was orchestrated by school kids, and thus not really that significant. Like anyone older actually understands how to work a computer.

They have even made a statement that they were going to hold someone responsible and fire the guy who took the data home. I think with thirty-four years on the payroll, that actually means some sort of involuntary retirement. In my experience, firing a civil servant is a process that outlasts everyone involved in the process, from the employee to the supervisors to the Department itself.

I opened up the letter and read it carefully, since I have never met Secretary R. James Nicholson. I was curious to know what he was going to do to protect me, since his department created the problem.

The Secretary started off in a chatty manner, telling me what happened, and that he was working real hard with the FBI to get to the bottom of the crime. He said he was going to do a “full-scale” investigation.'

I was relieved. I had anticipated the usual half-assed level of effort.

He apologized for the inconvenience, indicating that he had some problems of his own just trying to find all the people he had compromised. Most of the people whose information was stolen only dealt with the VA once, on the way out of the military, and he only had current information on several million of us.

To contact the rest, he said he had asked the internal Revenue Service to provide address information. He specifically assured me said that addresses, tax returns, income and dependent information was not going to be retained on anyone's laptop. At least not in his Department.

He told me I didn't have to do anything, unless I became aware that someone was opening credit card accounts or purchasing houses under my assumed name. He cautioned me to be extra vigilant. Should I become aware of someone ruining my credit and retirement, he said there was a website I could go to.

If I owned a computer, of course. But I imagine he checked with the IRS to find out about that before he signed the letter.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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