(CNN) — A person walks right into a thrift retailer.
A New Zealand man finds confidential U.S. army recordsdata on a used MP3 participant he purchased at a thrift retailer for $9.
It sounds just like the opening line to a foul joke. And this case was a foul joke — for the Pentagon.
Chris Ogle of New Zealand was in Oklahoma a few 12 months in the past when he purchased a used MP3 participant from a thrift retailer for $9. A couple of weeks in the past, he plugged it into his pc to obtain a track, and he as an alternative found confidential U.S. army recordsdata.
“The extra I take a look at it, the extra I see, and the much less I feel I ought to be,” Ogle mentioned with a nervous snigger in an interview with TVNZ.
The recordsdata included the house addresses, Social Safety numbers and cellular phone numbers of U.S. troopers. The participant additionally included what seemed to be mission briefings and lists of kit deployed to scorching spots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of the info seems to this point to 2005.
The New Zealand journalist who first reported the story was in a position to contact no less than one of many troopers by dialing a cellphone quantity discovered within the recordsdata. He hung up as soon as she defined why she was calling. 
Watch how man found secret army recordsdata »
Pentagon officers informed CNN that they’re conscious of the MP3 participant, however cannot speak about it till investigators verify that the knowledge got here from the U.S. Division of Protection.
“The federal government is not doing job of defending the knowledge that it collects,” mentioned Marc Rotenberg of the Digital Privateness Info Heart in Washington.
Regardless of authorities efforts to guard delicate info, this can be a rising drawback, privateness consultants say.
Two years in the past, the Division of Veterans Affairs misplaced observe of a laptop computer with the private info of hundreds of thousands of troopers. And pc onerous drives with categorized army info have been discovered on the market at road markets in Afghanistan.
“When you possibly can determine American personnel, when you’ve gotten their names, their dwelling handle, their cellular phone numbers, you set individuals in a harmful place,” Rotenberg mentioned.
On this case, the private info for a number of hundred troopers landed in pleasant arms. Ogle informed CNN the MP3 participant is being saved in a secure place and he’ll fortunately flip it over to U.S. army officers in the event that they ask for it.
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