A coalition of five veterans organizations and several individual veterans filed a class action lawsuit in Federal district court yesterday, in response to the recent theft of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) computer files that held protected information concerning at least 26.5 million veterans and their family members. The lawsuit seeks redress for those veterans whose private information was needlessly placed in jeopardy by VA staff and is now in the hands of criminals, and to establish judicial oversight of the massive amounts of data in the VA’s records. United Spinal Association, a national veterans service organization, wholeheartedly supports this litigation.
“We are deeply concerned over the truly frightening consequences that this breach of VA information security will have on veterans and their loved ones across our nation. For, potentially, the rest of their lives, millions will have to look over their financial shoulders to watch out for credit fraud and identity theft,” said United Spinal President Clair Russell Hesselton.
Despite the shock over the magnitude of the lost data, which includes Social Security numbers, addresses, diagnostic codes that reveal specific disorders and disabilities, as well as individual levels of disability compensation, United Spinal is not surprised by this incident. For several years, veterans groups, Congress, and even the VA Inspector General has warned that VA information security is vulnerable to attack or other kinds of breach. Yet the VA seems to have taken no substantive measures to safeguard private information, nor is it even aware of just what information it has in its records. The VA’s recent announcements that it had discovered that the stolen data includes information concerning tens of thousands of active duty personnel, as well as members of the National Guard and the Reserves—then revising that number to more than two million the next day—is a testament to the VA’s inability to responsibly administer its systems of records.
United Spinal Association believes that, because the VA, its employees and management utterly failed to abide by the law in this instance, this lawsuit is necessary to ensure accountability and to maximize the chances that this kind of disaster will not re-occur. Hesselton added, “The law imposes direct responsibilities on government agencies to keep such data private and secured. In this case, the VA, though lax security and oversight, took an enormous gamble, and millions of innocent veterans lost.”
