U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/washington/20cnd-data.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=washington&adxnnlx=1177192947-1iyMIFUltS7Ob8sh1NAOgw

U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers

By RON NIXON
Published: April 20, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 20 — The Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations.

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.

“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.

The first link that appeared in the search results was for her farm’s Web site. The second was for a site that she had never heard of, FedSpending.org, which provides a searchable database of federal government expenditures. The site uses information from the Census database.

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