Political Data Abuse

I know politicians are easy fodder to pick on and probably some of it is undeserved, but when I read a recent copy of Computerworld, I just couldn't help myself.

The cover featured an article on the Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. Seems Governor Huckabee decided to do some house cleaning before leaving office to make life easy on his replacement - he ordered the destructuion of hard drives in nearly 90 computers before leaving office!

What makes matters worse is Governor Huckabee has declared himself a candidate for President in the 2008 election. Even if there was nothing scandalous on the hard drives, wouldn't you think destroying them as you're about to enter a campaign is just a little curious?

Ironically, the flip side of Governor Huckabee's "data disappearing act" was just a few pages away in an article on the Chicago Elections Board.

Seems a 2003 fire in the Cook County Administration Building led to the distribution of more than 100 CDs with the social security numbers and personal information of more than 1.3 million voters to aldermen and members of local ward committees. Not only could they access the information, they could actually make edits and delete information!

The irony of this in my mind, besides the incredible extremes of abuse, is the fact that the regulatory compliance burden on organizations is generally imposed by politicians.

Sounds like it's time for the politicians to get their own data under control(s).