Privacy lost: New cybercriminals besting government's protections

It would not matter who was in the White House.

There is no question about it -- government servers don't seem to be safe. And therefore, it is safe to assume, neither is the information stored there.

And, by the way, that information belongs to all of us.

There have already been some pretty scary encounters -- like when a classified data base was breached and private information about military officers and their families was no longer secret.

And the latest, that an IRS website has been hacked and hundreds of thousands of people's information has been compromised, is not too reassuring either.

There are some lessons to be learned here. The first is that we need to make sure as the digital world makes data collection easier, that the security safeguards are in place to protect it.

You don't want your personal information in the hands of an untrained bureaucrat who could send it into the digital blue yonder with a mis-click of a mouse.

And the second is that perhaps the government should not have so much access to so much information -- and perhaps we should think twice about private agencies and businesses that collect it, too.

Once the security breach cat is out of the bag, it is pretty tough to stuff it back in, so caution at the beginning is better than reaction to an emergency at the end.

And as we seem to have witnessed lately, we are already behind the eight ball.

Published in Editorials on August 18, 2015 10:46 AM