P.I.: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?

Private Eye: Are you sure about that?
Monday (March 7th) thieves rammed a car into a Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) office in North Las Vegas. They made off with the following items

• 1,700 blank Nevada driver's licenses
  
• 1,700 blank laminated covers with the embossed state seal
  
• 1 DMV license printer
  
• 1 DMV camera
  
• 1 DMV computer
  

Now with the blanks you can make a near perfect official driver license... the only thing lacking is it wouldn't be in the Nevada DMV computer database. But no need for the thieves to worry about that because the computer contained the identidata 8,900 Nevada residents already in the database. That is everyone who was issued a driver license in that particular office between November 25, 2004 and March 4, 2005. After claiming the information on the computer was encrypted, the Nevada DMV is now admitting it was not. What sort of identidata was on the computer? Just the usual DMV stuff: name, date of birth, Social Security number, photograph and signature. If I was one of those 8,900 I'd be very nervous.

The Nevada DMV says "removing the equipment and locking it up every night would not be realistic because of all the wiring". That is very inaccurate. Here is some free advice: Encrypt the data and use removable harddrives. They slide in and out of the PC about like a VCR tape. Pop the drive and lock it up. Or use an external drive that connects by USB or IEEE 1394 (Firewire). Of course this offers no protection from a theft during office hours. A better solution is to store the identidata on a remote network drive in a secure room. This could be inside the local office or hundreds of miles away. The Nevada DMV has already taken steps to remove the identidata at the end of each work day. That at least limits exposure to a day's worth of data.

Of course the bigger question is how secure is your DMV information?

I'm standing in the middle of the desert
Waiting for my ship to come in
But now no joker, no jack, no king
Can take this loser hand
And make it win
- from the song "Leaving Las Vegas" performed by Sheryl Crow, written by Crow/Bottrel/Baerwald/Gilbert/Ricketts (c)1993