You’ll tell us what we ask for, citizen, and we’ll tell you what we please. From the NYTimes:
In 2007, Robert M. Nelson, an astronomer, and 27 other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued NASA arguing that the space agency’s background checks of employees of government contractors were unnecessarily invasive and violated their privacy rights.
Privacy advocates chimed in as well, contending that the space agency would not be able to protect the confidential details it was collecting.
The scientists took their case all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose last year.
This month, Dr. Nelson opened a letter from NASA telling him of a significant data breach that could potentially expose him to identity theft.
The very thing he and advocates warned about had occurred. A laptop used by an employee at NASA’s headquarters in Washington had been stolen from a car parked on the street on Halloween, the space agency said.
Although the laptop itself was password protected, unencrypted files on the laptop contained personal information on about 10,000 NASA employees — including details like their names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and in some cases, details related to background checks into employees’ personal lives. …