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Another Social Security Breach at UC Leads to Further Call for Legislation
By Frank D. Russo
Assemblymember Dave Jones Jones is the author of legislation that would require all colleges and universities in California to remove Social Security numbers from their Internet-accessible files unless their inclusion is absolutely necessary.
A startling announcement yesterday by UC San Francisco makes his legislation all the more necessary. UC announced that personal information – including the Social Security numbers – of up to 46,000 students, faculty, and staff may have been lost due to a computer security breach, potentially exposing thousands of Californians to risk of identity theft. This is serious stuff.
Jones, Chair of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, where the bill will receive it's first hearing, said: “The University of California owes their students and employees an explanation for why these breaches continue to happen, If UC has to collect highly sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers, then they have a responsibility to keep it under lock and key.”
His bill, AB 1168, has many important provisions to minimize the frequency of these breaches. It would require the schools to redact Social Security numbers from student applications stored for more than one year.
Jones introduced the measure after the December 2006 announcement by UCLA that a data security breach there exposed the personal information of up to 800,000 students, employees, parents, and applicants to computer hackers.
That UCLA incident is but the latest in a string of data breaches at California colleges and universities that have occurred since 2005. According to reports compiled by the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, institutions of higher education are among the most frequent victims of hacking and computer thefts that expose private information to unauthorized viewers.
Recent data security breaches at California colleges and universities, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse database, include the following:
• April 6, 2005: UCSF: A server in the accounting and personnel departments was hacked. It contained information on 7,000 students, faculty, and staff members.
• August 17, 2005: CSU Stanislaus: Hacking exposed 900 records.
• August 30, 2005: CSU Chancellor’s Office: Hacking exposed 154 records.
• July 14, 2006: Cal Poly: Laptop computer was stolen from the home of a physics department professor July 3. It included names and SSNs of physics and astronomy students from 1994-2004.
• November 28, 2006: Cal State LA Charter School of Education: An employee's USB drive was inside a purse stolen from a car trunk. It contained personal information on 48 faculty members and more than 2,500 students and applicants of a teacher credentialing program. Information included names, SSNs, campus ID numbers, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses.
• February 15, 2007: City College of San Francisco: Names, grades, and SSNs were posted on an unprotected Web site after summer session in 1999. CCSF stopped using SSNs as student IDs in 2002. 11,000 records affected.
• March 7, 2007: Los Rios Community College: Student information including Social Security numbers were accessible on the Internet after the school used actual data to test a new online application process in October. 2,000 records affected.
The state of California should do all it can here to protect the privacy of its residents. Jones and other legislators have introduced other measures dealing with this problem outside of education as well. We'll keep you posted on how these bills fare in the legislature.
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