I can’t say it better than Network World’s headline, “Feds encrypt 800,000 laptops; 1.2 million to go.” More than two years after an unencrypted laptop and hard drive containing sensitive data on 26.5 million current military personnel, veterans, and their spouses were stolen from a Veterans’ Affairs employee’s home, the federal government still hasn’t added this basic level of security to their mobile computing equipment.

In the last year, agencies have purchased 800,000 licenses for encryption software through the federal Data at Rest (DAR) Encryption program, which is run jointly by the General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Defense. […]

While sales on the DAR Encryption program are stronger than anticipated, federal officials admit they haven’t secured all of their laptops, handhelds and removable drives yet.

“It was originally thought that there would be about 1 million laptops in DoD and one million in civilian agencies. We roughly came up with the number of 2 million laptops. However that number is informal. It’s constantly being expanded and contracted,” says David Hollis, program manager for the Defense Department’s Data at Rest Tiger Team.

The feds are getting an extreme discount on the software — more than 80 percent! So they can’t use cost as an excuse for leaving so many government laptops unencrypted.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 and is filed under Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Possibly related posts:

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