In the federal government, perhaps the old adage “do as I say, don’t do as I do” is the most appropriate. After lambasting the PCI (credit card) industry for lack of protection of consumer data, the US government continues to fail to protect its own data. Or, that is, your data under the control of government employees and contractors.

Many thanks to @TheftAlerts on Twitter for letting me know, the Army National Guard reports the theft of a laptop belonging to a contractor, containing the unprotected PII data of approximately 131,000 Army National Guard members (both current and former). Here’s a blog entry that @TheftAlerts mentioned.

The official statement says:

“The stolen laptop contained personal information on Soldiers enrolled in the Army National Guard Bonus and Incentives Program. The type of data includes names, Social Security Numbers, incentive payment amounts and payment dates.”

Wow. Names, SSNs, payment amounts and dates. That’s a fairly bad way to thank our servicemen and women.

Furthermore, “The Army Guard will inform those Guard members who are determined to be impacted by this incident by mailing a letter to them, Noller said. He added that notification of all individuals should be completed by next week.”

Keep in mind that if 131,000 letters go out, that alone will cost around $50,000, and perhaps much more. MyLaptopGPS could have protected a good-sized fleet of laptops for their entire lifecycles for that amount, and we haven’t even gotten to the credit monitoring fees yet.

The epidemic continues, as does the severe lack of preventative foresight.