Maybe it's time to revive the notion of "competence"

Remember 1988, when Michael Dukakis was ridiculed for talking about "competence"? Maybe that notion wasn't so ridiculous after all. When you look at Iraq, spiralling debt, and everything else the Bush Administration has touched, competence looks pretty damn appealing. But even if you support bankrupting the country in perpetuity to finance the Iraq War, you've got to be a bit perturbed about a government that wants ever more of your information at the same time as it can't handle what it has:

Three or four FBI laptop computers are lost or stolen each month and many times the agency doesn't know whether information on the machines is sensitive or classified, the Justice Department's inspector general said in a report Monday.

Inspector General Glenn Fine said the FBI is reducing thefts and disappearances of weapons and laptop computers, but the bureau acknowledged in a statement Monday that "more needs to be done."

Gee, ya think?

The Boston field office reported a stolen laptop containing software for creating identification badges. The laboratory division at Quantico, Va., said a stolen laptop had names, addresses and phone numbers of FBI personnel.

"Perhaps most troubling, the FBI could not determine in many cases whether the lost or stolen laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," the report said. "Such information may include case information, personal identifying information or classified information on FBI operations."

Of the 160 laptops lost or stolen over a 44-month period, 10 contained sensitive or classified information. The bureau did not have records on whether 51 others had such data.

Meanwhile, the Veterans Affairs Department of the Support Our Troops Adminstration -- you know, the one that cut funds for veterans' health care and sends them to war with inadequate equipment -- is as cavalier about their information as it is about their lives:

The Department of Veterans Affairs began notifying 1.8 million veterans and doctors Monday that their personal and business information could be on a portable hard drive that has been missing from an Alabama hospital for nearly three weeks.

The hard drive may have contained Social Security numbers and other personal information from about 535,000 individuals and billing information on 1.3 million doctors nationwide, the VA said. That's more than 37 times more people than authorities initially believed were affected.

An employee at the VA medical center in Birmingham reported the external hard drive missing on Jan. 22. The drive was used to back up information on the employee's office computer. It may have contained data from research projects, the department said.

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (news, bio, voting record) questioned why it took the agency so long to begin sending out notification letters.

"I certainly understand that the VA wanted to get a handle on the facts. But it became very apparent very early on that they had a breach of security," said Davis, a Democrat from Birmingham.

Veterans Affairs officials said they were moving as quickly as they could. "We are providing information as we learn it from an investigation," said spokesman Matt Burns in Washington.

The VA first publicly revealed the equipment was missing 11 days after it was reported, saying then that personal information on as many as 48,000 veterans may have been stolen.

The VA said Monday it doesn't have any reason to believe anyone has misused data from the hard drive, which is also at the center of a criminal investigation. The agency offered a year of free credit monitoring to anyone whose information is compromised.

Davis said the department told him that the missing storage unit included the Social Security numbers and names of about 10,000 people, plus another 525,000 Social Security numbers. The information on doctors includes names and Medicare billing codes, he said.

Free credit monitoring. Well, that's damn nice of them. How about taking care of the fucking data correctly in the first place?

This is what happens when you have a government that is completely technologically illiterate. You can export an entire database now to a flat file that you can take out of a facility on a flash drive that fits in your pocket. These drives are easily lost. I ought to know, I've lost four of them. But all four were mine, none of them contained sensitive information, unless you call chapters from my unfinished novel "sensitive", and all four are probably in my house under a piece of furniture somewhere.

It's one thing if this happens once, because unless you're prepared to search employees on their way out of the building, you're not going to be able to 100% guarantee that no sensitive information leaves the building. However, I'd be interested in knowing how many people who have lost such information and placed the entire financial lives of those whose information they've lost at risk have faced consequences.