Let’s play ‘name…that…outrage’

June 8, 2006

Here’s a fun little game. I’ll give you the quote and source; you guess what outrage the person is describing.

“It’s amazing. Such [tag]incompetence[/tag] is worse than anything I’ve ever seen in six administrations,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said during a news briefing. “At some point, this administration has got to stop saying we’ll hire or appoint political cronies, but will actually appoint somebody who knows how to make the government work.”

Katrina? Iraq? Medicare Plan D? What amazes me is that this exact response could apply to several dozen controversies involving the [tag]administration[/tag].

In this specific case, it’s the stunning — and widening — [tag]data[/tag]-[tag]security[/tag] [tag]breach[/tag] now encompassing nearly all [tag]active-duty[/tag] [tag]military[/tag], Guard, and Reserve members.

In the Senate, Democrats renewed their criticism of [tag]Veteran Affairs[/tag] Secretary [tag]Jim Nicholson[/tag] and demanded his ouster following the agency’s disclosure Tuesday that personal information for 2.2 million military personnel — not just 50,000, as initially believed — was stolen from a VA employee May 3. […]

In the House, about 150 Democrats called on President [tag]Bush[/tag] to request emergency funds to provide free [tag]credit[/tag] monitoring for the millions of [tag]veterans[/tag] and military [tag]personnel[/tag] who are now at risk for [tag]identity theft[/tag].

“These records were stolen more than a month ago, and we’re still figuring out what information was lost?” asked Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, whose House Government Reform Committee will hold hearings today in which Nicholson will testify. “We need to hear a good explanation for why that is.”

So far, neither the [tag]White House[/tag] nor the VA has one. What a surprise.

Res ipsa locquitor…. what you see is what you get. The morons are both incompetent AND corrupt. “Won’t get fooled again!” Indeed.

  • Veterans have been getting screwed in this country for decades. This was only a matter of time. From what I understand it it hard enough to navigate the VA and get benefits that are due to you even without the possibility of ID theft. Could this be yet another department where the plan is to break it so badly that the logical conclusion is to scrap it and start over? This plan of the neocons to prove big government is bad by running it into the ground is really sad.

    ID theft is serious. Our automated and digital world depends on accurate data. This is the missing scale on Smaug’s underbelly. Information security must be tightened. The private sector gets this, why does the government seem to be in capable of securing VA data?

    If I were a terrorist I would not plant a bomb or hijack a plane. That is too obvious and the damage is too localized. If I wanted to hit America and hit it hard (which I do not, despite the fact that I do not spew nationalist rhetoric) I would attack our dependency on technology and data. Business, taxes, Wall Street, Banking, Government programs, communication, security, and even our military are technology and data dependent. If you want to see the country go to hell in a hurry disrupt one of these systems or better yet plant doubt about the reliability of these systems. Americans will be cashing in 401K’s and withdrawing funds from banks in no time.

    This VA incident needs to be a warning to everyone that we need to get serious about all kinds of security not just checking my shoes for plastique when I get on an airplane.

  • There is a silver lining to stuff like this. The career military became seriously Republican after the Vietnam war. Perhaps now, with the military living in FEMA trailers over in Iraq, getting divorced, equipment needs neglected by the White House, veterans benefits slashed, and now their identities in the hands of crooks…! Perhaps now they will finally learn after all that they were tools, not partners, just like the religious right and the bigoted right are just tools. This is just what the military needed to depoliticize them. Perhaps the next president can maybe do something about the military industrial complex, too.

  • “There is a silver lining to stuff like this….” – Flibble

    Nope, I just don’t believe it will happen. In a country where conservatives want to eliminate the Estate tax that will never affect them, rhetoric has obviously defeated logic. These people do not vote their interests, they vote the interests of the super rich. And the U.S. Military is one of the major sorces of this stupidity.

    They are so happy hating Jane Fonda, Michael Moore and the French that they can’t see how they are being screwed by the Republican’ts they elect. They will simply claim that the left in America was waiting for Haditha to happen so that liberals could trash the military, when in fact what liberals want is simply to punish the guilty and get the military out of the situation where this happens.

  • Funny thing is- this is all incredibly easy to fix. Just tighten the damn credit laws, get rid of instant credit and all that, and the problem will take care of itself for the most part. It is inevitable that personal data will be lost- and a lot of it, multiple times. The best way to secure that data is to make its value as close to zero as possible.

    So, it may mean less money for credit card companies, since it wouldn’t be so easy for someone to apply for a credit card, but most identity theft these days is geared for ordering up things of monetary value- cars, appliances, credit cards, etc.

  • You know, Castor, I’ve been wondering about that. And it is possible to go to the credit reporting companies and tell them you are afraid someone has stolen your identity and to put a note on your record to not give out credit without checking carefully.

    So if everybody in America contacted all the Credit Reporting companies with that same request, we would not even need to change the laws.

    Think how that would screw over the predatory credit lenders!

  • Does anyone else find it funny that they can’t figure out who did this ? A guy secretly takes the data home and it gets stolen. Sounds like “dong ate my paper” bush type of story. I mean some super smooth hacker just happened upon this guys home computer. It’s non-sense.

    I am a Vet by the way.

  • As a veteran, this goes beyond pissing me off. If my fellow veterans, who still blindly follow this administration only because it’s the Party of Reagan, don’t pull their collective heads out of their asses, then they deserve whatever problems this creates for them.

  • So, raise your hands everyone who actually believes that fifth-rate piece of shit VA “employee” was really “robbed”????

    Hmmm…. no hands.

    Surprise surprise.

  • CB – Your posts are starting to sound like Jon Stewart more and more (Let’s play ‘name…that…outrage.’) Better to laugh at all these disasters than to cry?

  • All along, I’ve been questioning the likelihood that computer and data were stolen by a common thief. I even wonder whether the people involved are really into normal credit fraud and identity theft.

    Seriously, how many organizations/groups/nations/terrorists would love to have basic personal data on nearly all of our active military and most of our veterans?

  • Tom and Frank do raise the scariest possibilities.

    It’s so nice to know the Bushites care SO VERY MUCH for the U.S. Military and Veterans that they let this happen 😉

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