Washington – Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Nicholson told Congress on Thursday he is “mad as hell” about the theft of personal data on more than 26 million veterans and about his department’s failure to notify him about it promptly, and he promised to take strong “corrective action” following an investigation.
Appearing successively before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and a joint hearing of the Senate veterans and homeland security committees, Nicholson said he accepts responsibility for the loss of veterans’ data resulting from a burglary at a VA employee’s home.
But he appeared to fix the bulk of the blame on the data analyst who took the electronic data files home to work on without proper authorization and lost them when his laptop computer and an external hard drive were stolen.
Lawmakers charged that the problem goes far beyond the transgression of one employee, lambasting Nicholson and other top VA officials for an information security system that has been repeatedly identified as vulnerable in recent years.
“We can’t pin this on one individual,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Nicholson. “This is a systemic breakdown. The system is so poorly designed that one employee can compromise the whole thing.”
“The lives of millions of our nation’s veterans could be turned upside down as a result of this security lapse,” said Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo.
VA officials told the committees that computer equipment appeared to have been a main target of whoever committed the burglary but that there was no evidence of a focused effort to steal data on veterans.
Nicholson testified that “I am the person responsible for this situation.” If the May 3 theft at the data analyst’s Aspen Hill, Md., home was not bad enough, “I was not notified about this event until May 16,” Nicholson said in opening remarks.
“As a 34-year veteran myself, I am mad as hell,” he said. “I am outraged by all of this. I am outraged that the employee would do this so recklessly, and I am outraged that I wasn’t notified about this sooner.”
Nicholson, a longtime Colorado resident, served in Vietnam and spent 22 years in the Army Reserve.
