Why did one laptop have info on that many vets to begin with? What was the position of the "owner" or that laptop?

After thinking about it for the last day or so, I have to agree it's rather suspicious. It's been suggested that this guy's home wasn't actually burglarized, but that the burglary was faked to cover the theft of the personal information. I haven't been given any evidence of this, but it sure smells fishy.

Yeah, I speculated that such a "theft" was a setup, too. And I blogtificated for quite a while on how this has affected my oh-so-wonderful job. Whee!

//...how stupid do you have to be to screw with 26 million professionally trained killers//... who was that liberal guy that was all over your comments pages a week or so ago?

Here is an important money quote;
"Affected veterans can ask any of the credit reporting agencies to place a fraud alert on their accounts, which will help prevent criminals from opening new credit accounts in their names."

We've had a theft like that at my company.
We all had to undergo an electronic training and certification because some doofus got the stuff stolen just like this.

The company paid for one year of monitoring by the credit bureaus. The vet's effected really need to do that.

I find some of that strange too. 26,000,000 is a big number. I don't think MS Access could handle that. And usually you don't run database servers on laptops. So why was that much info on one laptop in the first place?

And how do they know where to send the warning letters if all the vets' information was stolen?

"Hey... where's that back-up laptop?"

"I took it home so that I could finish working on that project I was working on when the other laptop got stolen."

"DOH!"

Something isn't quite right here... One laptop - with the names and information of 26 million people on it? I don't friggin think so! What the hell kind of a laptop was this anyway and what the hell kind of DB was it running? I have NEVER seen a laptop that will handle a database this big and effectively sort records with this much data. Give me a break! C'mon! Somebody get with the program here!

What were they running? Oracle, Sybase or DB2 with Lynux? Maybe the laptop has a login access to a central DB on a RISC or Mainframe Server somewhere with 26,000,000 vetrans but I can guarantee you they ain't on that one machine. Hell the laptops I've carried can't even handle my little MS Mail address book before they blow chunks! I'm an IT Program Manager by trade, by the way...

Interesting... checking other news sources, I see some use the phrase "up to 26 million".

Also, this site:

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=66258

observes:

"There are only about 26.5 million living American veterans, and only a fraction of these have ever sought anything from the VA. More than two-thirds of us separated from the military well before the 1975 date that the VA alleges. So, the real story is: Why did VA have this data in the first place? How did they collect it? And why did they collect it? For what purpose?"

My current theory is that the VA said that they lost some data, but didn't know how many people were affected (since they didn't know exactly which database was involved). So the VA guy probably said something like "It could involve any number of America's 26 million vets," and the press just ran with the big number.

Truth is, it's probably no more than the number who applied for VA assistance.

UNLESS... I saw another source refer to a stolen "data disc". Maybe it was the complete Vet's database, and idiot-boy was just using it as a reference to update info on the smaller VA database. Maybe the complete database got stolen along with the laptop.

I'm sure we'll hear more in the next few days.

Only if they can blame someone on the right. If 'idiot-boy' was a Dem, expect it all to get buried pretty quick.

There are a lot of theories on this one, but here's my 2 cents.

1) Was it really 26 million or up to 26 million? Up to could be 10,000 and 26 million could just be the number of vets.

2) The letters could be sent out because it's very likely the database and any other databases are backed up.

3) The laptop could have just been stolen because it's a laptop. That happens. BUY A CABLE TO LOCK YOUR LAPTOP! Probably useless though if it was stolen from the guys house.

4) As for the 26 million records thing being handled by Access, who says it has to be Access? MySQL 3.22 had a limit of 4 GB per table. Newer versions on a Windows NTFS filesytem have 2 TeraBytes and possibly larger per table. That would be sufficient for the records in question

However, even with that I still think any database that large would be centralized with an end user interface instead of each user having to store the whole database on each of their computers.

One of my few totally serious responses:

Idiot reporters: If the thief didn't know what he had when he took it, the newsdorks damn sure made it clear what was taken with the "26 MILLION Credit Records stolen!!!...." reports every 4 minutes on the news.