The Defense Department, the Royal Bank of Scotland and even state and local governments all belong to an exclusive club, and this is a club to which you do not want to belong. All had severe security breaches, and sensitive data was released to the public.

Hard drives containing defense department information were purchased in 2009 at a street market in Ghana for $40, according to a documentary aired on PBS.

In a press release sent out on December 23, 2008, RBS Worldpay, the online payment arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland, admitted a hacker extracted personal information on 1.5 million card holders, including 1.1 million social security numbers.

In early 2009, the city of Muskogee, Oklahoma, discovered that a computer “zip” disk containing personal information has been in public circulation since 2000, according to the group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to find incidents of severe security breaches by the U.S. government and companies. And that in itself is disturbing.

Producer/Correspondent Peter Klein and a team of graduate journalism students from the University of British Columbia set out to record the health and environmental hazards of e-waste around the world. The result was the documentary “Digital Dumping Ground” shown in June 2009 on PBS. But e-waste is not the only danger Klein and his team found.

In Ghana, they found hard drives from the United States and elsewhere sold in an open-air market. Here Klein and his team purchased for $40 a hard drive that came from Northrop Grumman, the U.S. defense contractor. The drive contained sensitive information about multi-million dollar contracts with the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

Some hard drives are sold to criminal gangs that mine them for credit card data, Social Security numbers and other identifying information.

In February 2009 the Ponemon Institute surveyed 43 companies that had suffered data breaches in 2008. “For a majority of companies, it was not their first time,” said Larry Ponemon. “Eighty-four percent of cases were repeat offenders, and only 16% were new.”

The loss of personal information and the possible consequences are not something the American public takes lightly when it affects them. In healthcare after a data breach, 6.5% of customers will leave their provider. In financial services 5.5% will end the business relationship.

Information gathered from:
Ponemon Institute; Fourth Annual Cost of a Data Breach Study, February 2009
PBS press release; “Ghana, Digital Dumping Ground”
RBS company press release
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse; A Chronology of Data Breaches