Resources for Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)

Statement from Gary D. Bass on Privacy Violation in Government Data

www.ombwatch.org

t has become public information today that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been including Social Security numbers in a data field that identifies certain public financial transactions with government (e.g., loans). In response, OMB Watch has taken two actions. First, we have temporarily redacted the information in the USDA data field, which serves as a unique identifier, from our online service, FedSpending.org. Second, we call on the federal government to immediately remedy the privacy violation by providing a new unique identifier that does not contain personally identifiable information.
This gross negligence on the part of the federal government is unacceptable. What appears to be a longstanding violation of federal law needs to be fixed without delay to protect the privacy rights of our citizens, and new identifiers need to be immediately generated to replace the current data to maintain the public's ability to track and review the government's spending of tax dollars. This fix is not technically difficult to accomplish and should be done immediately.

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