So when are corporations and government agencies going to stop letting employees running around with laptop computers that contain the personal information that belong to other people?

In another recent blunder involving a Connecticut state employee, a laptop computer was stolen from a car belonging to a state tax department employee. Oh great, it’s not enough that a northeastern nanny state like Connecticut is taxing their citizens in every way they can dream of (and then some!), they are now in the business of distributing personal information belonging to tax payers for the benefit of identity thieves and other crooks.

Apparently, the tax department employee was vacationing in eastern Long Island and decided to bring along a state-owned laptop that happened to contain the personal information belonging to 106,000 Connecticut residents. Maybe the dedicated state employee was planning to get some important work done while basking on the beach.

By the way, it occurs to me that the well-known and very upscale “Hamptons” are on eastern Long Island, are they not? Perhaps there are other vacation destinations on eastern Long Island besides the Hamptons, but if this employee was indeed spending some choice vacation time in the Hamptons, I think he should find a more appropriate way to thank the taxpayers of Connecticut for a salary that allows a vacation in such an exclusive area besides leaving a laptop with their personal information in his car unattended.

But if you think about it, I guess personal information is a lot like the money that governments collect from taxpayers. It’s not “real” money, it’s just “play money” to be squandered on pork barrel projects to further the political ambitions of those in control of the purse strings.

In addition to the usual blatherings from Connecticut’s governor declaring the incident “inexcusable,” the tax department’s “communications director” (wow, there’s a position that the taxpayers of the Nutmeg State could not do without!) declares that the information on the laptop is “password protected” and that “the person who stole it would need some computer knowledge to be able to gain access to the Social Security numbers.”

Well, that should certainly be a comfort to those whose information was stolen along with that laptop. Yeah, right. Apparently, the “communications director” is not aware of what a big business this kind of crime has become. With today’s  computer criminals creating some of the most sophisticated and dangerous programs (ever hear of a “root kit?”) ever unleashed, any thief with half a brain is going to figure out how valuable that laptop really is and find the computer criminal who would probably pay a hefty price for that laptop and have the know-how to crack the code and extract that personal information.

This stuff has to stop. There has to be extraordinarily strict rules that prevent employees of various government agencies and corporations from traveling about with computers containing personal information belonging to others. And by strict, I mean if you lose a laptop, you’re fired. End of story. Maybe that will encourage some of these morons from leaving laptops unattended.

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