Illinois employees are facing suspension for improperly accessing President-Elect Barack Obama’s driving records, news organizations report. According to the State Journal-Register:

The employees, who work in secretary of state offices throughout the state, include workers at licensing facilities and in the departments of Vehicle Services and Drivers Services, spokeswoman Penelope Campbell said.

All of them looked up Obama’s driving record after he was elected president Nov. 4, although none of them was authorized to do so, she said.

This is not the first time Obama has had problems with individuals invading his privacy. A few weeks ago, Verizon admitted Obama’s personal cell phone records were wrongly accessed by the telecom company’s employees. In March, the State Department announced that three contract employees improperly accessed the confidential passport files of Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

The Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation announced that it had made a mistake that “resulted in the exposure of the names and Social Security Numbers of approximately 250,000 customers who received services through Florida’s One-Stop Career Centers between January 2002 and November 2007.” The data became public in mid-October, because the agency “inadvertently placed confidential information belonging to a group of customers who had previously received workforce services onto an external test server.”

The agency’s response to the publication of the sensitive data was slow. Though the problem was found in late October, the agency waited for more than a month to send notices to the people affected. These people should have been immediately informed, so that they could take steps to protect themselves against fraud or identity theft.

People who might be affected may learn more at http://www.floridajobs.org/security/. Find out more about security breaches and identity theft at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. The organization has a “Chronology of Data Breaches,” which shows that 246 million records have been exposed because of security breaches in the public and private sectors since January 2005.

The New York Times has an interesting column about a common dilemma faced by doctors: What to do when children tell secrets to a physician and beg the adult not to tell their parents?

I’m not talking about the child who tells you something that makes it clear he’s in danger. Those are the “easy” ones (though in another sense they can be tremendously difficult), and I’ve had my share: The 13-year-old girl who is frightened of a much older guy who sometimes seems to follow her home. The 14-year-old boy who has been thinking about dying a lot ever since his grandmother died. The seventh grader who is being beaten up on the playground. No matter the age, when I feel the child is actually in danger, I explain that I have to let the parents know.

But as I talked to my colleagues — including my son’s pediatrician, Dr. Herbert Lazarus — we all kept coming up with ambiguous cases. Because you do value the child’s trust, and you don’t want to lose it.

Computerworld has a survey of the best privacy advisers in 2008. Other findings from the survey are interesting, as well.

The most remarkable finding was that 31% of companies said they’re planning to increase their 2009 budgets for outside privacy advice, despite the stock market implosion and U.S. recession that unfolded before the survey. Only 13% said they were decreasing their budgets. [...]

A third surprise was who topped the consulting charts. We went back and re-examined the data on this one to detect any fundamental bias or flawed methodology. But out of 684 tallies, our pollster reported that the Big Four firms fared the same as niche consultants Rebecca Herold & Associates and Corporate Privacy Group (CPG) among companies earning more than $1.6 billion per year, the current minimum to rank in the Fortune 1,000. [...]

I noted a significant increase in the level of European participation in the survey, matching the total for the U.S. Midwest region. Of the Europeans, nearly all were votes by and for U.K.-based firms.

C-Span has video of the panels from ”A Path Forward: Constitutional Protections in Homeland Security.” The Majority Staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security hosted a series of roundtable discussions on the future of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security.

Protecting Civil Liberties in a Natural Disaster

Privacy Implications in Data Mining

Privacy, Domestic Intelligence, and Information Sharing

Transportation Security and Privacy and Civil Liberties

Border Security, Privacy, and Civil Liberties

Cybersecurity and Privacy

Here’s my previous post with information about panel members.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has released its annual report (pdf) on data mining programs at the agency. The report focuses on three programs: (1) the Automated Targeting System (ATS) Inbound, Outbound, and Passenger modules, under U.S. Customs and Border Protection; (2) the Data Analysis and Research for Trade Transparency System (DARTTS), under Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and, (3) the Freight Assessment System (FAS), under the Transportation Security Administration.

This report comes on the heels of one by the National Research Council that found data mining programs don’t really work. The Council’s report, “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment,” was sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. Read more »