Kansas City Loses IRS Tapes
Second in our series of stupid comments to the press, here’s Kansas City’s assistant city manager commenting on the fact that they lost 26 computer tapes containing personal information:
“It’s not a situation that if you had a laptop you could access,” Noll said. “You would need some specialized equipment and some specialized knowledge in order to read these tapes.”
While you may be concerned the missing tapes contain your personal information, Cindy Richey, a financial planner, said don’t be too alarmed.
“I think people might be surprised at how much of that is already floating around out there,” Richey said.
Got that? Don’t worry because 1) someone would need a tape drive to read those tapes, and 2) your personal information is all over the net anyway.
Anonymous Coward • January 24, 2007 1:11 PM
Feh.
So, no criminal has a tape drive?
Or perhaps the tapes were in a proprietary format?
The technology has existed for YEARS that allows for backup tapes to be encrypted. Will encryption only be used by the NSA, in SSL, and by a few paranoid hackers using GPG?