Japan Today Japan News - Personal data on residents of entire town stolen. FUKUSHIMA -- Digital tapes recording personal information of all 9,600 residents in the town of Iwashiro, Fukushima Prefecture, have been stolen, police said Saturday. The theft occurred at around 6:20 p.m. Thursday after a company employee received the tapes at a local government building and briefly left a suitcase containing them in a locked car while en route to deposit them, the police said, adding the window of the car, owned by a computer company in Koriyama in the prefecture, was broken. Town officials said the stolen tapes were backups for the controversial national resident registry network and contained six types of information used in the registry -- a resident's name, address, date of birth, sex, resident registry code and the record of changes of the information. [Privacy Digest]
Many critics of the system have voiced concern over the possibility of data leaks. The latest incident may again stir debate over the issue, analysts said.
"Stir debate?" It seems to me this theft ends the debate, by proving the critics were right in the most definitive way imaginable.
11:29:07 PM 
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