Poof

Stealing 17,000 Student Identities at a College on Long Island

By Dan Rattiner

Nassau County College here on Long Island has 21,000 students, about 1,500 professors and a wide range of course offerings, including a class on credit ratings and identity theft. Last Monday, the identities of all 21,000 students were stolen.

What happened was just one of those things. The names, addresses and social security numbers of all the students was on a computer in the administration building in Farmingdale, protected by a password. A clerk, told to add to each student’s file, information about student activities they were participating in, was given a print out of each activity — football, school newspaper, acting club and so forth — and then told to cross reference the names into the computer. The clerk, however, was not one of those computer savvy people, and felt it would be easier to do the job by printing out the entire list alphabetically and then, in pen, adding the activity onto the printed list, then transferring the information back to the computer.

Clerks know how to create big thick bound books. And so the computer list was printed out, covered and bound, and placed onto the clerk’s desk with a thump. This was going to be a big job. And so, the clerk rolled up her sleeves and before she began, decided to go to the bathroom. When she came back, the book was gone.

Called in were the Nassau County Police Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Obviously, somebody in the administration building did this, probably somebody who knew the book was being printed out and got within a dozen yards or so from the desk just waiting for the clerk to go to the bathroom. Or maybe the clerk had made some backroom deal with members of the underworld. Or maybe the book just got put someplace accidentally. The bathroom might be a suspected location. And so names were taken, and clerks and passersby who happened to be in the administration building at the time are being interviewed and the whole area is being dusted for fingerprints. Other officers are looking for the book in lockers, behind filing cabinets, above ceiling tiles, in wastebaskets. The Nassau County Police Department Third Squad is leading the investigation. Maybe it fell off the desk into the trash. The garbage has had to be gone through.

Kenneth K. Saunders, who is Vice President for academic and student services, has written a letter to each and every student — the names are still on the computer protected by a password — and in this letter he is advising them that the school will do everything it can to retrieve this book, but in the meantime, they should each call one of the three national credit bureaus and tell them what happened and urge these bureaus to be on the lookout for any dramatic changes in either the identities of the students or the activities they purportedly engage in. He included in this letter, the name of the three bureaus and their telephone numbers.

The credit bureaus will, of course, filter all of this down to the banking community, which will then closely monitor bank accounts and so forth. And there will be a cost for this service, which, Nassau County Community College VP Saunders, wrote that the college will bear since they were the cause of all of this.

Meanwhile, reporters for different radio, television news services, and newspapers have fanned out to interview the 21,000 people who have apparently had their identities stolen to ask them how they felt about all this. Most talked freely with these reporters, but almost nobody would give their last names.

“Call me Biff,” one student told Newsday. “And yes, I am worried about this.”