How To Split An Atom

In today’s episode of Privacy Nightmares and Government Irresponsibility we present the U.S. Commerce Department, which has recently released numbers that admit to the lose of almost 300 information gathering devices including over 200 laptops.

Many of these laptops contain the extremely personal information that census field agents gather on a daily basis, and almost half of the laptops were stolen out of the census taker’s vehicles.

The Commerce Department admits that this is a problem, however, it says that encryption and password protections should keep others from tampering with the information.

Whether this turns out to be true, it’s more than apparant that policy changes are necessary at all levels of government. It is difficult to justify rolling the dice that your encryption will not be cracked when someone’s sensitive information is at stake.