Stars and Stripes
European edition, Saturday, July 8, 2006

NORFOLK, Va. — The Navy announced Friday that personal information on more than 100,000 Navy and Marine Corps aviators and air crew was discovered on one of its Web sites on Thursday. The information was immediately removed from the Naval Safety Center’s Web site, a press release said.

The Web site is publicly available. The information included full names and Social Security numbers and was also contained on 1,083 Web Enabled Safety System program disks mailed to Navy and Marine Corp commands, the Navy said.

It said officials were working quickly to notify affected individuals, including active and Reserve members as well as any aviator who may have served during the past 20 years. Letters are going to each person advising that a call center will be available at 1-866-827-5672.

There is no evidence that any of the data has been used illegally so far, the release said, though individuals are urged to monitor credit card and bank accounts and other transactions.

Evelyn Odango, public affairs officer at the Naval Safety Center, said authorities had determined the cause of the posting was a programming error made in connection with an application created for the Web site in December 2005. The program reported mishaps among aviators, Odango said.

There have been several such instances recently affecting service members. In the most clamorous incident, personal information for some 26.5 million veterans was lost when a burglar stole a laptop from the home of a Veterans Affairs employee who had taken it home. At first the VA said it thought active-duty personnel were not involved, but later it said the list of inadvertently revealed information included about 1.1 million active staffers and 1.1 guardsmen and reservists. As in the other cases, officials said there was no sign anyone had wrongly used the information.