If your children go (or have gone) to school in Williamson County, you might want to check out the links below. We were informed yesterday by phone call and also on the news that sensitive information on 17,000 students was leaked on the internet. We checked the names of all of our children and thankfully but unfortunately Declan's information was the only one included in the leak. Please check the names of your children to see whether or not they were effected and what you need to do.

Here are the links to the news story and the website to check names of those affected -

http://www.wkrn.com/global/story.asp?s=8650322 (news story at WRKN)
https://www.ssnbreach.org/ (website to check names)


This is information on what happened, this was included when we found Declan's name -

The Liberty Coalition published the following press release about this breach, which is republished here for your convenience. The city references the location of the breaching entity, and not the location of this individual:

BRENTWOOD, Tennessee. On August 28, 2007 at least three files with sensitive information for about 17,000 Tennessee K-12 students and the names of several hundred teachers were posted on a personal website which has since been taken down (http://tnweb.org/). One file contained the Grade Levels, Elementary School, Teacher's Name, Student's Birth Date, Student's Full Name, Student's Gender, and Test Scores for about 11,789 students. Another file contained the Grade Levels, Elementary School Names, Social Security Numbers, Students' Full Name, Gender, and test scores for roughly 2,247 elementary school students. The file also contained the names of several hundred teachers. A third file contained the names, social security numbers, and composite scores for approximately 3,000 K-12 students.

The files were placed online as a part of a Longitudinal Dissertation by Christopher Nugent, who had used the website as a temporary method to transfer files between computers. The website never contained direct links to the files, and Mr. Nugent believed that the files had been encrypted during transfer, and mistakenly believed that the files had been deleted afterward. Mr. Nugent generated random IDs and purged names before working on the data set for his dissertation, to ensure privacy. He was shocked to find that Google had somehow indexed the original files, and acted immediately to take down the website and alert search engines to clear their caches. In an e-mail to the Liberty Coalition, Mr. Nugent expressed his dismay, "Because I believe that the privacy of every individual is of the up most importance, I cannot express to you enough that I believed I had taken every precaution to maintain strict security procedures and secure all information."

The FBI was notified, and Google took its sweet time purging the files. The last file was finally removed October 2, 2007, despite the efforts of Mr. Nugent and the Liberty Coalition.