Update April 21st

Constituents:

     It looks like we may be heading into May with the legislative session.  Governor Otter just vetoed 10 bill is in order to put the pressure on the Legislature to pass his transportation initiative.  The Senate late yesterday afternoon did pass a 6 cents increase on a gallon of gas.   It will be interesting to see what the House decides to do today.
 

     His vetoing HB161 is a real mystery to me. The bill focused on holding Idaho State Agencies accountable for the way they handled Idaho citizen and employee personal data and information.   This has been of major concern since there have been five major security breaches regarding the handling of Idaho citizen and employee personal data by State Agencies during the past five years.   Terry Probst-Martin,  Chief Security Officer, for the Department of Administration reports there are at least 100,000 hacker attacks on State Networks each week.  The legislation was directly aimed at offering further protection of Idaho citizens from Victim ID Theft through increased protection and vigilance by State Agencies and personnel.
 

     The legislation actually got its start in Latah County when the Latah Soil Conservation District approached the three District 6 legislators with a major problem. The Idaho State Soil Conservation Commission was demanding all confidential data of farmer cooperators and employees including social security numbers. tax numbers, bank account numbers, debit-asset ratios, and other confidential data from the local districts.  Since two of the ISSC loan officers had been convicted of embezzlement during the past two years there was not a great deal of trust by the local districts regarding the ISSC.   There was also no statutory authority or any reason for the districts to send the personal/confidential information to the ISSC.  The issue escalated to the point that the ISCC withheld state appropriations from a number of districts for their refusal to send the personal information.  Then in early October I was contacted by one of the local districts and told that the ISSC had posted all the personal information of 30 or more farmer-cooperators on their website and it had been out there for all the world to see for over a month. In my mind this was a security breach.   I called the Idaho Attorney General's Office and the information was pulled off the ISSC website within 24 hours.
 

     HB161 was developed with the help of Mike Gwartney, Director of the Department of Administration,  Terry Probst-Martin, Chief Security Officer, and the Idaho State Attorney General's Office.  The AGs office also provided a positive AGs opinion.   The bill was a bi-partisan effort co-sponsored by Reps. Ringo, Chavez, Shepherd, Roberts, and Trail and Senators Schroeder, Heinrich and Stegner.  The bill passed through the legislative process without a negative vote, and then comes the Governor's veto.
 

     Several legislators quoted the Governor as saying that he had not read the bill, and that the bill was a solution in search of a problem.  A recent Consumer Report noted that State Governments and the U.S. Government are notoriously poor guardians of you personal data.   During the last two years poor handling of client personal records and data by local, state, and national government agencies has resulted in the exposure of more than 44,000,000 citizen's records, and a loss through Identity Theft of over $2 billion dollars. Personally I think the Governor got poor advice from his staff, and that his veto of HB161 increasingly puts Idaho citizens and employees at risk for Victim Identity Theft.
 
Representative Tom Trail

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