From a story in the San Francisco Chronicle:



Does
this proposed legislation have implications for what we do?  For
example, what if your county is licensing tax assessor data to a
reseller?  Yet another barrier to public access to our data? 
How about what the good guys at http://www.fecinfo.com/ do, commercially, with the FEC data?



Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (SF Chronicle)

Another incident for UC

By David Lazarus

   The University of California has suffered yet another potential data breach, this one involving the names and Social Security numbers of about 7, 000 students, faculty and staff at the San Francisco campus.

   For Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., enough is enough. She told me Tuesday that she'll introduce federal legislation within the next few days requiring encryption of all data stored for commercial purposes.

   “What this shows is that there is enormous sloppy handling of personal data,” Feinstein said.

   This latest incident involving UCSF follows news that UC Berkeley lost control of personal info for nearly 100,000 grad students, alumni and applicants last month when a laptop computer was stolen from an unlocked

campus office.

   It also follows a flurry of other security lapses, including San Francisco's Wells Fargo, the nation's fourth-largest bank, experiencing no fewer than three data breaches due to stolen computers over the past year and a half….



More at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/06/BUGEOC3L5N1.DTL