As we reported last Friuday, the House Agriculture Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow on security breaches at the Department of Agriculture. This hearing is a follow-up to reports earlier in April of personally identifiable information being contained within USDA data that is widely available on the internet. This security issue was discovered on April 13 by a user of our FedSpending.org website. Also last Friday, Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) sent a letter to USDA Secretary Mike Johanns stating that the disclosure of personally identifiable information was "improper and unacceptable." Obama and Coburn also called on USDA to provide three things by May 18:

• An assessment of the harm caused by disclosing Social Security numbers and a report on utilization of the credit monitoring service;
• A report on what is being done to ensure that data security problems are fixed; and
• A detailed plan and timeline for adopting a new unique identifier without disclosing personally identifiable information.

OMB Watch also requested the third item on the above list from USDA on April 16, and I'm guessing there will be a few Representatives at the House hearing tomorrow who have some questions that will need to be answered as well. Here's hoping for USDA's sake that they have some answers ready to go.