US Navy leaking data?
The US Navy is trying to determine how the personal information of more than 100,000 air crews wound up being available on a public website for more than six months.
The full names and social security numbers of both active and reserve Navy and Marine service personnel appeared on the Naval Safety Centre website at
www.safetycenter.navy.mil last December.
Those affected are believed to include Navy or Marine Corp aviators who had served during the past 20 years.
The same information was also disseminated late last year to Navy and Marine Corps commands on 1,083 program disks mailed out as part of the service's web-based Enabled Safety Program.
The Naval Safety Centre found out about the problem and removed the information from the website on Thursday, a week after the recovery of a stolen Veterans Affairs Department laptop that contained sensitive information on more than 26 million US military veterans and service members.
The centre is now recalling the mailed program disks.
As in the case of the Veterans Affairs laptop, the Navy said there was no evidence that any of the disseminated data has been used illegally.
But the service is notifying those affected by mail and setting up a 24-hour call centre to handle queries.
Safety centre spokeswoman Evelyn Odango said the problem appeared to be an errant file.
"The information was inadvertently included in a file that was then posted on the web," she said. "We found out about it through a website user and it was removed immediately."
