The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Rick Weiss report that a National Institutes of Health laptop computer with the records of 2,500 patients was stolen from an NIH worker’s car in February. The records contained years of the patient’s medical information, but the NIH didn’t inform the patients until last Thursday. Indeed, the NIH response to the security breach seemed based on the institute’s biweekly board meetings.

The records could have been made secure had information technology personnel encrypted the data. This never happened, though, and now NIH joins the club of an estimated 19 federal agencies that have recently left citizens vulnerable to identity theft.  Read Nakashima and Weiss here.   MB

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