State Attorney General Releases Report on Surge in Data Breaches
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STATE AND LOCAL ROUNDUP | Charleston, S.C. earthquake risk … Texas air pollutants … and Pennsylvania prison mail lawsuits.
Good morning, it’s Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2018. Data breaches lead Route Fifty’s state and local government news roundup but scroll down for more form places like Sacramento, California (where state workers watching pornography on the job has drawn scrutiny) … Orange City, Iowa (where there was bookburning) and French Settlement, Louisiana (where the police chief was arrested for something his wife did)
DATA SECURITY | The third-annual data breach report from Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson released on Tuesday found that 3.4 million Washingtonians were impacted by breaches between July 2017 and July 2018, a 26 percent increase over the previous year and a 200 percent increase over two years. “The number of Washingtonians impacted by data breaches increased for the second consecutive year,” Ferguson said in a statement. “We must strengthen our law to help Washingtonians secure their sensitive information.” Under Washington state law, companies and organizations are obligated to notify the state attorney general’s office when there’s been breach impacting 500 or more state residents. [Washington State Attorney General’s Office]
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS | While South Carolina is at risk to hurricanes, parts of the state, including Charleston, face major seismic hazards, too. Sections of the peninsula the city was built on sit atop soils vulnerable to liquefaction during heavy shaking. The last major earthquake in South Carolina happened in 1886, damaging or destroying many buildings in Charleston. [The Post & Courier]
IT MANAGEMENT | Out of the 54 California state agencies surveyed by a NBC Bay Area investigation, “20 percent had launched internal pornography investigations since 2015.” [NBC Bay Area]
LAW ENFORCEMENT | A former North Dakota Department of Transportation employee “is facing felony charges that she embezzled thousands of dollars in customer transactions.” [Bismarck Tribune] … A coalition of prosecutors, including Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, is asking the Florida Supreme Court to find the state’s latest “Stand Your Ground” law unconstitutional. [Miami Herald] … The police chief in French Settlement, Louisiana has been “arrested after his wife was caught driving a marked patrol vehicle with a suspended license.” [WGNO]
CORRECTIONS | The American Civil Liberties Union has filed two lawsuits against Pennsylvania’s state government over “overly restrictive policies on legal mail sent to prisoners.” [WITF / Keystone Crossroads] … Attorneys for three North Carolina prison inmates want Hepatitis C testing for all prisoners. [@NCCapitol / WRAL]
LIBRARIES | The Orange City, Iowa public library’s board has not yet responded to a man who checked out four LGBT-related books and burned them during a Facebook Live broadcast. [KSOU via Radio Iowa]
ENVIRONMENT | A new study from Rice University researchers has found that state regulators “are basically ignoring the most harmful kinds of air pollutants that come from Texas coal plants.” [Houston Public Media]
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty and is based in Seattle.
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