Quick! Where did that quote come from? Hint, not a TV show or a movie… You’ll have to get to the end of the post to find out the answer…

This post though is about an organization that isn’t on the ball, and yesterday I got a letter that just further serves to drive home that point and leave me concerned about the security of my information.

Who am I talking about?

The US Department of Veteran’s Affairs…. In case you didn’t know it, back in May some VA employee took home a VA owned laptop with the personal information of approximately 40 MILLION people. That laptop was stolen, with all that personal information on it. Now nobody’s bothered to tell us just what this clown was doing with the personal records of 40 MILLION people to begin with. What could he possibly have been doing that he needed to have those records readily available to him?

Better yet, it took the VA over a month and a half to draft up a letter and notify people that their information may have been lost.

A month and a half ago the FBI managed to recover that laptop and after doing some forensic analisys of the computer, they determined that the information on the computer had not been accessed.

Yesterday I get a letter from the VA, telling me that the laptop had been recovered and that the information hadn’t been accessed. Great, and not the least bit timely. Even better, the letter was dated “August.” Not August 1, or August 31, just August.

So let’s review, lost the data for 40 million people, took their own sweet time notifying those people that they lost the data, and then took their own sweet time notifying those same people that the data had been recovered… Again, way to be on the ball…

And the answer to the question at the start of the post: The quote is from Gomez Adams from “The Adams Family Pinball Machine,” one of my favorite pinball machines.