Exactly What Is Needed!

Claiming that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs "flagrantly disregarded the privacy rights of essentially every man or woman to have worn a United States military uniform," veterans groups filed a massive class-action lawsuit June 6 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Please take a few minutes to read the EWeek article in the link. Here is the part that really stood out to me (I'm picking and choosing pieces of the article here):

According to the plaintiff's attorney, Douglas Rosinski, the primary thrust of the suit is to force the VA to handle veterans' personal information properly...Rosinski told EWeek "(The lawsuit is)primarily and principally an effort to invoke court supervision of the VA." Rosinski said that what makes the data loss even worse is that the VA says it isn't sure exactly what information was actually lost. "That they don't know what they lost is a violation of the privacy act," Rosinski said.

Such blatant disregard for data privacy is what makes data breaches so rampant. It is not just the VA, but many, many organizations that manage and maintain information about their employees and customers.

Now I am not usually a big fan of lawsuits. I think they are overused with many being quite frivolous. But not this one! Here is an example of a group standing up to protect their rights. And, of course, veterans are used to doing this because that was their job when they were in the military - to stand up against any enemy and protect the rights of the citizens of the United States of America. So I say, "go get 'em" veterans.

The lawsuit, which could impact up to 26.5 million veterans, seeks damages of $1,000 for every person listed in the missing database files. That doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Of course, if they win, that is a huge number. I'm of the opinion, though, that it will take a huge win like this to knock some sense into businesses that handle sensitive customer data. If a settlement in the billions of dollars looms over their heads then it business executives might just begin to start thinking that fixing the problem will be cheaper than suffering the consequences of a data breach and lawsuit.

Hey, if we aren't throwing inept executives into jail, maybe we can at least penalize their companies monetarily. Well, I can hope, can't I?