The crazy race to shove a broken ObamaCare system into our faces is going to make identity theft so common that we’ll revert to sending each other parchment letters with wax seals. Today’s triumph of government data security comes from the Minnesota health care exchange, where a highly trained employee accidentally emailed 2,400 Social Security numbers – on an unsecured Microsoft Excel spreadsheet – to an insurance broker who was applying to become a member of the vast army of ObamaCare “navigators” we’ll need to make sense of the flaming bag of bureaucratic excrement our health care system has become.
But don’t worry, because as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune assures us, it was all just a silly mistake, and the ObamaCare crew called the broker right away “walked him and his assistant through a process of deleting the file from their hard drives.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The response to a massive breach of data integrity, which put the security of 2,400 Americans at risk, was to call the guy on the phone and walk him through the highly complicated procedure for deleting a computer file.
“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” said the broker. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”
Well, for starters, the “wrong hands” probably wouldn’t follow telephoned instructions to delete the file and forget he ever saw it.
An IT expert quoted by the Star-Tribune urged “caution in pushing the federal hub online before it has been thoroughly tested.” Fat chance. The people in charge of this disaster cannot possibly afford to hit the launch date without a massive number of Americans crammed into the passenger cars of the ObamaCare train wreck. There are reports that they’re trying to stagger enrollment to keep the entire system from crashing the minute it goes live in October, but they can’t afford to admit that the entire thing is insecure and unready. That would give too much political momentum to the Americans who want to escape from ObamaCare.
Once upon a time, our parents and grandparents were assured that their Social Security numbers would never be used as a form of national ID system. Now it’s all we can do to hope that some ObamaCare drone doesn’t email them into the wilds of cyberspace and turn our identities into a black-market commodity.
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