April 15, 2007

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  NEWS: Reward Offered for Stolen Laptops

   

  The Chicago Public School system (CPS), along with local police, is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man believed to have stolen two CPS laptops last week. A Chicago-area network news station reported that the filched computers represented a significant security concern, as the hard drives contained personal information of some 40,000 CPS employees.
  
  Chicago police are trying to find a man who is suspected of having lifted the laptops from CPS headquarters around noon on Friday. The computers are believed to hold the names and social security numbers of several thousand employees who paid into the teachers' pension fund between the years of 2003 and 2006. Naturally, authorities are concerned that the data breach constituted by the laptops' theft might place all those individuals at an increased risk for identity theft. A CPS spokesperson stated at a press conference this weekend that a suspect's image was captured by surveillance video. The computers belong to McGladrey and Pullen and its subcontractor — accounting firms that were reviewing the history of payments to the CPS Teacher Pension Fund.
  
  Individuals belonging to Chicago's teachers union say that they found out about the theft through media news coverage, not CPS, and are seriously upset about their privacy being violated by the theft. Many expressed outrage at the fact that the laptops weren't more carefully guarded. CPS has something like a poor track record with security issues – apparently, the names, socials, and addresses of 1,500 teachers were mailed out accidentally last November.
  
  
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