Salem + computers = What can go wrong?

Among the many things that Oregon state government does a bad job with, information technology is one of the worst, if not the very worst. Now the Department of Motor Vehicles has been hacked, and the cybercriminals of the world have their hands on highly sensitive information on three and a half million of us. Anybody with a driver's license or state ID card. Name, address, date of birth, height, weight, eye color, whether you wear lenses to see better, and I assume our photos as well. I can't tell from the sketchy news stories so far whether vehicle registration information was also stolen – I assume so – and that will also show what you drive and who you got your car loan from.

Worst of all, the Oregon driver's license application also takes your Social Security number, and so the crooks probably have that, too. And whoa Nellie, that alone is enough to make all of our lives miserable. As a recent victim of one of these "data breaches" in a different context, trust me. When the dark web types start acting up with the data, victims will spend hours trying to keep their lives in order. I recently killed an entire morning on the phone with the IRS just to get them to accept my tax return.

One of things I wonder about is whether the crooks and their shady pals are now able to match vehicles' license plate numbers with their owners. That information is usually difficult (though not impossible) to get. I remember when, years ago, before they restricted it, some guy got all the plate numbers and their owners, for the whole state, through legitimate public records requests, and posted them on the web. The authorities quickly put a stop to that, but the cat may be out of the bag now.

When private businesses let their guard down and get hit like this, most of them offer to buy a year's worth of credit monitoring for all of the victims. So far, I'm not hearing anybody in Salem offering anything of the sort. They're telling us that we now have to keep a sharp eye on our credit reports. But if we want the credit agencies to send us an email when somebody starts taking out loans in our name, apparently we'll have to pay for that ourselves.

That, in legal parlance, is what is known as a crock.

And although they found out about the breach at least several days earlier, the Salem bureaucrats were planning to stall saying anything about it until they could drop a nice Friday news dump. At least the media got wind of it and blew the whistle on a Thursday.

Speaking of the calendar, it's a holiday weekend of sorts, but I'll bet you a few class action plaintiffs' lawyers in Portland are in the office today doing some research into how hard it is to sue a state government for incompetence. The damages fron this one could be enormous.

Here we are, a state that can't stop handing out tax breaks to big tech companies. You would think the politicians and bureacrats would pay some of them some major bucks to get the state's I.T. house in order. You know, actually get some valuable service for our money. But no.