Friday, March 21, 2008

The passport problem

I don't normally talk about work, but these stories today on the passport "breaches" have been pretty ridiculous.

It seems that several contractors looked at the passport records of Hillary Clinton, Obama, and McCain. As has been reported, passport records only show the applications that people fill out, and occasionally some sort of proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate. It doesn't say where you've been, where you are now, etc -- we're not that organized. Not that it's unimportant -- these are addresses, social security numbers, etc -- but it's far from nefarious.
There are also stories that say people "hacked" into these records. Some people have access, some don't. There isn't any hacking involved. There is, however, an alarm trigger when people view the records of celebrities, so that their private information isn't seen for no good reason. That happened here, the alarm worked, the three people were caught, and that's it.
No doubt, there will be some sort of security tightening after this. But I hope it all doesn't get out of hand. At the end of the day, they're just three people who did something stupid.

No comments:

Post a Comment