By now, you’ve probably heard that some grunts at the State Department have been fired or reprimanded for poking around in Barack Obama’s passport file. If you haven’t, The Caucus has a synopsis:
On three separate occasions in January, February and March, three employees looked through Mr. Obama’s file in the department’s consular affairs section, violating the department’s privacy rules, the State Department spokesman, Sean D. McCormack, said. Mr. McCormack said the department’s internal controls flagged the breach, which he attributed to “imprudent curiosity.”
State Department officials said that they had no idea why the employees broke into Mr. Obama’s files. The department is continuing to investigate, Mr. McCormack said.
Now, in theory, I don’t mind the government or businesses accumulating and mining data on ordinary, average people. However, my not-minding assumes that access to the data will be restricted to specific purposes, that inaccuracies in the data can be identified and corrected, and that breaches of those two points will be swiftly and harshly punished.
The slow response at the State Department, and the relatively weak reaction, seem to me to be indicative of a disturbingly lax attitude toward privacy and data security in this age of information.
If we are a society that allegedly seeks to swiftly and harshly punish certain crimes, shouldn’t breaches in privacy also be on the “swift and harsh” list?