Scott Reid, chief deputy director at Consumer Affairs, sent the following message about the arrest of a fellow state worker to all Department of Consumer Affairs Workers late Friday afternoon.
Bee reporter Andrew McIntosh obtained a copy and broke the story online. You can read his report here.
Here's Reid's memo:
Administrator/DCANotes
08/15/2008 04:21 PM
To: DCA A - B, DCA C - D, DCA E - F, DCA G, DCA H, DCA I-L, DCA M - O, DCA P-Q, DCA R, DCA S, DCA T-Z
cc
Subject: Privacy Incident Update
On Tuesday, June 10, we notified you of an unauthorized transmission of personal information involving DCA employees. At that time, we provided you with information about how to prevent identity theft and place fraud alerts on your credit reports.
On Wednesday, June 17 we informed you that DCA would be entering into a contract with a credit monitoring service to help protect you against possible identity theft, and on Wednesday, June 24, we informed you that we had, in fact, secured a contract with CSIdentity to provide free credit monitoring services and $25,000 of identity theft insurance.
Rest assured that since the discovery of the breach, the Department and its Division of Investigation (DOI) has worked diligently to determine the facts surrounding this unauthorized release of personal information and committed to taking whatever steps were necessary to hold accountable the party or parties involved.
Many of you had questions surrounding the circumstances of the breach and wanted to know what had happened and why. Regretfully, while we were able to share some limited information, much of what we knew was part of on ongoing investigation and unfortunately could not be shared without risk of compromising the inquiry.
The Department is now in a position to share with you that the investigation has been completed and the results have been turned over to the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office.
The investigation concluded that a former employee in DCA's Office of Human Resources (OHR), inappropriately e-mailed a file containing the names, position numbers, salaries and Social Security numbers of all DCA employees to a private e-mail address. This occurred on Friday June 6, her last day of work, and was discovered through DCA auditing software on Monday June 9.
Today, this employee was arrested on five felony charges stemming from the breach and from the discovery of material from other state agencies found during the execution of a search warrant at her residence.
The charges include three felony counts of theft/falsification/removal/destruction of official documents and two felony counts of unlawful access and/or transmittal of computer data.
At this time, the Department has no evidence that the information the employee allegedly compromised from DCA has been in any way misused, however, her actions were very serious and warrant criminal prosecution.
DCA takes pride in the dedication and commitment of each and every one of its employees and holds sacred the trust it enjoys with all Californians. When this trust is violated, there is no choice but to do everything within our power to hold perpetrators accountable.
DCA is hopeful that today's arrest is an important step to restoring this trust and we are grateful and appreciative for all of those who assisted in the investigation.
The Author
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