To Serve And Protect The City's Finest, From ID Theft

In any locale, a municipality's police force is charged with protecting its populace from crime. That's what makes it saddest when it can't protect its own -- police officers and their families -- from easy-to-avoid abuse.

This past week, a civilian official at the New York Police Department's pension fund was charged with walking off with eight computer tapes from an undisclosed location on Staten Island, according to an account in the New York Post.

The suspect, Anthony Bonelli, got past a guard, unplugged video cameras watching the storehouse and made off with Social Security Numbers, direct deposit information for bank accounts and other personal identification information for 80,000 current and retired cops.

This would warrant no attention at all if the department encrypted any of the data it stored about its members or its work. But neither the department nor the pension fund operation would comment on whether the data was encrypted, when contacted by Between the Lines.

In a telephone recording, the fund is telling callers that it "does not believe that member information has been compromised." Its offering those members credit protection for one year.

That confidence may be because the tapes were recovered when the suspect was arrested over the weekend.

In the meantime, its security experts ought to check all archives and take a tip from this 2005 podcast on its site that urges civilians to make sure "any personal identification information is not legible" on documents they are disposing of.

By encrypting the data -- and publicizing that, internally -- the pension fund would not have exposed any of its data to a worker that wanted to make off with it.

And greatly reduced the concerns of any of the present or past members of the City's Finest who never thought they'd be potential victims of identity theft, at the hands of their pension fund.