The Canadian Government Lost the Personal Information of 583,000 Students

While I'm sure that most government bureaucrats and civil servants are genial, well-meaning individuals, they're also in the sometimes-unenviable position of getting paid with your goddamn tax dollars. Unenviable because when they make mistakes, they risk being the focus of one giant public stink-eye, especially if they do something that makes elected officials look bad. For example, when a group of bureaucrats posed as new immigrants for a symbolic citizenship ceremony on Sun News, it appeared as though Sun News is in bed with the Conservative Government (surprise!), which then prompted a public shaming of said bureacrats from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. However, when bureaucrats from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) lost an external hard drive containing the personal information of 583,000 Canada Student Loan borrowers (from the years 2000 to 2006), people didn't seem to care that much. It's kind of surprising that more Canadians haven't been talking about the lost government hard drive that led to such a massive loss of data and infringement of privacy. It might appear as though Stephen Harper was correct to scrap the long-form census because, like, who the fuck are these people supposedly protecting our personal information in the first place?

The HRSDC office informed me, via email, that the lost hard drive was a Seagate GoFlex. In other words, it was thetype of portable hard drivethat a disgruntled employee could easily have unplugged from its intended USB port, carried outside in backpack, and uploaded the contents of which in to a shared Dropbox with the free Wi-Fi of a local organic coffee shop. But don't get too worried if you're one of the potential victims, because the HRSDC insists they have "no evidence that any of the information has been accessed or used for fraudulent purposes," suggesting that the data loss was probably a case of negligence rather than sinister intent. The same federal agency also lost a USB key containing the personal information of another 5,000 Canadians in November, suggesting that it's commonplace for these civil servants to keep confidential information on small portable devices, which can then get lost behind the staff refrigerator or forgotten in a glove compartment somewhere.

The HRSDC office informs me that as a result of strict new security protocols, the agency will "no longer permit the use of external hard drives" for the management of sensitive data. Unfortunately, that doesn't help the people already affected. The improbably named William Wolfe-Wylie at canada.com offers a damning summary of the damage that can be wrought with the lost information. The hard drive contained names, dates of birth, social insurance numbers, contact information and loan balances, which is enough for someone to attain a fraudulent birth certificate or driver's license and then proceed to open a bank account and apply for credit. Basically, it would be like the trailer for that movie Identity Thief, but even less funny because it would also ruin your credit rating, making it that much harder for you to settle down and get a mortgage with your Jason Bateman.

This privacy breach effects over half a million Canadians, which, to provide some perspective, is a little over 1.5 percent of the population and probably encompasses most, if not all, of the Canadian students who required financial assistance from Student Loans Canada between 2000 and 2006. If you took out any loans between those dates, you might want to call HRSDC's toll free hotlineto take preventative measures. The agency is providing free-of-charge credit protection from Equifax Canada, but if you really want to milk the ol' government titty, you can contact one of three law firms and join their class action lawsuit against the HRSDC.

Between the free credit protection and the lawsuit expenses, we don't yet know how much this will cost the government. When I asked how the agency would handle legal threats, they directed me toward the Attorney General. But you can bet it will cost more now than it would have if the government had just paid for its civil servants to take a course on How to Not Put Confidential and Potentially Damaging Information on a hard drive You Bought from Staples. But they're going to do that anyway; HRSDC also informed me that the new protocols would include "mandatory training for all employees regarding the proper handling of sensitive information, including personal information." So hopefully students who borrowed money from 2006-2012 will be safe from here on out, because their information was probably kept on someone's Hello Kitty USB keychain until a few weeks ago.

Follow Alan on Twitter: @alanjonesxxxv

More Canadian Policy Fuck-Ups:

I Kinda Like Vancouver's Poodle in The Sky

China Is Buying Its Way Into Canada

Blockades Could Send Idle No More Over the Edge