And the numbers keep growing and growing and growing.

A laptop containing the Social Security numbers and other personal data of 13,000 District of Columbia employees and retirees has been stolen, officials said.

The computer was stolen Monday from the Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, said officials with the company, which administers the district’s retirement plan.

The company did not notify city employees of the theft until late Friday because it took officials several days to determine what information was stored on the laptop, ING spokeswoman Caroline Campbell said.

The laptop was not password-protected and the data was not encrypted, Campbell said.

So I lied. We do hear about it every day and it is getting beyond ridiculous. There is a lot here that does not make sense, which is usual.

How could the employee not know what was on the laptop? Companies do not just give out personal information to employees carte blanche. This person had to have specific access to that information.

Again – Why is a company allowing people to take this information home? There is no reason at all for that information to have to leave the office. Laws should be put in place making it illegal for employers to remove the social security numbers of employees from the actual physical property of the company.

What kind of security does this company have? This is ING Financial. They brag on their commercials about how great of a financial company they are and they don’t even do something as trivial as password protect employee data? Anyone who uses ING should think twice because I am sure they don’t offer any protection on your financial information either.

I wonder if the FBI is investigating this serious rash of computer burglaries that are happening nationwide. In only three weeks we have heard of three different computers that have been stolen (this one, the one from AIG and the VA computer) that contained personal information of people. Either there is a massive increase in computer thefts going on or someone certainly knows which computers to take. Just the odds of these specific computers being “stolen” is mind boggling.

I would love to get my hands on the actual police reports from these thefts, if there are any. Think about the kind of bad press it would be if we heard about a financial services company, an insurance company or the U.S. government being hacked. These are the groups that usually claim they have high levels of computer security, yet information on their computers is not encrypted or password protected. It seems to me there is something else going on here that we aren’t hearing about.

The sad part is there is nothing the victims can do. If you get a job, you must give them your social security number. If you don’t then you won’t get that job. This is why Congress must pass laws regarding this. A social security number is property of the United States government. It is assigned to the citizens. This means states really can not pass the laws regarding theft of social security numbers – Congress must. Congress should pass a law imposing strict penalties on any company who exposes social security numbers to parties not privy to the information, either voluntarily or involuntarily. If the companies were to face these penalties then they would start doing something as trivial as saying “you can not take home personal information of employees/customers”.