Over the last week, I have seen an increase in OP/ED articles asking what can be done to curtail or eliminate the security breaches that continue to plague US government agencies. Here is a prominent one at issue:
We seem to now live in a world that wants to solve a problem with the same approach that caused the problem in the first place. We all have heard about people who drive faster to avoid getting a speeding ticket. There are countless examples of people who gamble themselves into bankruptcy in order to cancel a betting debt. And we all know a loved one who feels if three pills will relieve their headache then six will work twice as well for any pain disorder. The recent security breaches at a multitude of government agencies (i.e. Veteran Affairs, FBI, etc.), commercial data brokers (i.e. Choicepoint, Lexis-Nexis, etc.), scores of banks (Bank of America, Wachovia, etc.), businesses (i.e. AIG, ING U.S. Financial Services, etc.), universities (i.e. Boston College, Kent State University, etc.) and many more key economic sectors should tell us that we are doing something horribly wrong. These organizations have been entrusted with protecting our assets, our way of life, and in today’s global environment, our very lives. Yet, they seem to only want to throw more technology at what is not a technology problem.
