[Vision2020] Legislative Update

[ttrail at moscow.com]

LEGISLATIVE UPDATE

Constituents:

     It looks like we may be heading into May with the legislative 
session.  Governor Otter just vetoed 10 bill is in order to put the 
pressure on the Legislature to pass his transportation initiative.   The 
Senate late yesterday afternoon did pass a 6 cents increase on a gallon 
of gas.   It will be interesting to see what the House decides to do 
today.
 	
     His vetoing HB161 is a real mystery to me.  The bill focused on 
holding Idaho State Agencies accountable for the way they handled Idaho 
citizen and employee personal data and information.   This has been of 
major concern since there have been five major security breaches 
regarding the handling of Idaho citizen and employee personal data by 
State Agencies during the past five years.   Terry Probst-Martin,  Chief 
Security Officer, for the Department of Administration reports there are 
at least 100,000 hacker attacks on State Networks each week.   The 
legislation was directly aimed at offering further protection of Idaho 
citizens from Victim ID Theft through increased protection and vigilance 
by State Agencies and personnel.
 	
     The legislation actually got its start in Latah County when the 
Latah Soil Conservation District approached the three District 6 
legislators with a major problem.  The Idaho State Soil Conservation 
Commission was demanding all confidential data of farmer cooperators and 
employees including social security numbers.  tax numbers, bank account 
numbers,  debit-asset ratios, and other confidential data from the local 
districts.  Since two of the ISSC loan officers had been convicted of 
embezzlement during the past two years there was not a great deal of 
trust by the local districts regarding the ISSC.   There was also no 
statutory authority or any reason for the districts to send the 
personal/confidential information to the ISSC.   The issue escalated to 
the point that the ISCC withheld state appropriations from a number of 
districts for their refusal to send the personal information.  Then in 
early October I was contacted by one of the local districts and told that 
the ISSC had posted all the personal information of 30 or more farmer-
cooperators on their website and it had been out there for all the world 
to see for over a month.  In my mind this was a security breach.   I 
called the Idaho Attorney General's Office and the information was pulled 
off the ISSC website within 24 hours. 

     HB161 was developed with the help of Mike Gwartney,  Director of the 
Department of Administration,  Terry Probst-Martin, Chief Security 
Officer, and the Idaho State Attorney General's Office.   The AGs office 
also provided a positive AGs opinion.    The bill was a bi-partisan 
effort co-sponsored by Reps. Ringo, Chavez, Shepherd, Roberts, and Trail 
and Senators Schroeder, Heinrich and Stegner.  The bill passed through 
the legislative process without a negative vote, and then comes the 
Governor's veto.
 	
     Several legislators quoted the Governor as saying that he had not 
read the bill, and that the bill was a solution in search of a problem.   
A recent Consumer Report noted that State Governments and the U.S. 
Government are notoriously poor guardians of you personal data.   During 
the last two years poor handling of client personal records and data by 
local, state, and national government agencies has resulted in the 
exposure of more than 44,000,000 citizen's records, and a loss through 
Identity Theft of over $2 billion dollars.  Personally I think the 
Governor got poor advice from his staff, and that his veto of HB161 
increasingly puts Idaho citizens and employees at risk for Victim 
Identity Theft.
 
Representative Tom Trail


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