Protecting veterans' identities

You may recall last week that an employee of the Veterans Administration had a laptop that contained a database with more than 26 million personal records in it stolen. This led to Sen. Tom Harkin (D, Iowa) to introduce a bill called the Veterans Identity Protection Act of 2006.

The legislation would require the VA to provide one year of credit monitoring to each affected person. This will immediately alert an individual to any changes made on their credit report. After that first year, the VA would be required to provide one free credit report to each individual - that’s in addition to the free credit report each year already provided by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This means that, after the first year of credit monitoring, eligible individuals will have access to four free credit reports over the course of two additional years.

The bill also provides $1.25 billion to fund these actions. While I expect this legislation will be very popular among Congressional Dems in general, it's nice to see a candidate like John Courage, who is himself a veteran, endorse this bill. Will Lamar Smith follow suit, or is this not an issue that attracts his attention? We'll find out if it's ever allowed to come up for a vote.

In other Courage news, Vince reports from a conference call that touched on Net Neutrality and Lamar Smith's bizarre ideas about where Homeland Security funds ought to go. Check it out.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on June 05, 2006 to National news | TrackBack