Personal Data of 26.5 Million Veterans Stolen

I know, I know. You're all expecting a rant about the level of responsibility the government needs to show when playing with information that can be used against individuals. The importance of protecting the individual over everything when collecting data and the responsibility of the data steward to protect those whose information he oversees. Blah, blah, blah. I can do that speech and maybe next week I will, but this week, let me offer an alternative explanation. But before you begin to see me as cold and detached, let me offer up that among those 26.5 million veterans, I have both friends and family, so this is a little personal.

Also, a quick disclaimer. I don't work for the Veterans Administration. I never have either as a direct employee or as the employee of a contractor. I have never even worked with VA data. Might not even recognize it if I saw it on a computer screen in front of me!

That said:
I do work and have worked for government agencies. At present, I work for the health agencies of one of the largest states in the country. I analyze huge datasets. Not all of them are in the order of the 20 million observations, but all of them are too big to be imported into only-65,000-observations-MS-Excel. Have I mentioned that the public sector is exceedingly cheap when it comes to computer hardware? I have crashed SPSS more times than I care to think of simply for lack of available memory. I even crashed MS Access for my entire unit (shhhh. They still don't know it was me.) in my first week on the job. Why all the computer problems? Well, let's see, my computer operating system is Windows 2000 ~ I don't think that's a good sign. And while I can't speak for the current IT support, in prior government jobs, I have been head and shoulders above the IT staff in computer knowledge and ability and yet, they were still able to lord administrative rights over me. I do know that when our new unit director put in an order for top of the line high speed processor, huge RAM, enormous hard drives, etc computers for us, IT questioned the need. My unit director (who had already gotten approval for the expenditure from everyone from God on down) gave IT the quick explanation about what the average state employee uses a computer for (word processing) vs. what his staff uses one for (high level data analysis of enormous datasets) and basically put the guy in his place.

Now let's review what we know about government work in data analysis. HUGE datasets. Outdated computers lacking even the minimum hardware capacity to do your job. Deadlines that were usually weeks before you got the assignment. (Forgot to mention that one earlier, didn't I?)

So here's my point. I bring work home. Everyone does. In government work, I have yet to meet someone who actually can get their work done in 40 hours per week. (I'm sure the stereotypical government worker does exist, but they're not the ones running around with advanced degrees and actual program responsibilities.) I haven't brought any datasets home (most likely because I have no analysis software on my computer right now), but I have in the past. It's really hard not to when you know that the computer sitting in your apartment has eight times the capacity of the one in your cubicle. Efficiency begs you to use the one at home. Frustration nags that you just try using your own computer, just this once. And by data protection guidelines, (i.e. the number of people who have access to the computer with the data; the number of people who have access to the office with the computer, etc) sometimes your home computer rates higher than the one in your office.

Yeah, it was probably stupid to have the data on disks ~ and lets not be moronic, we're talking about cds or zip drives in the very least. 26.5 million records do not fit on a 1.4mb disk, or even several hundred of them! Chances are the data were in some obscure (only the government would use) database format like oracle that your average felon won't be able to even open. Or with any luck, they were in SAS (excuse the obscure on the government would use comment on that one ~ don't want to piss of the SAS users of the world), a format that just won't open unless you pay the lords at the SAS Institute an enormous licensing fee to use their software (read: you don't even get to own the software). And that shouldn't be too hard for the FBI to track, convicted felons with recently purchased SAS licenses...

But let me offer up an easy fix for all of this, beyond the obvious hardware upgrades for data analysis in government work ~ why not pay these highly skilled government employees more money (like the big bucks the private sector shells out for them) so they wouldn't be living in a place where burglary is so rampant???