This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown. Your data are never completely secure, but when governments have it all in one database, it's begging

to get stolen.

As governments in the private sector work to secure the data they have, the Cato Institute's

Jim Harper wonders if it's not time to rethink how we use identity.

There have been breaches of data by governments and private sector entities alike over the last

well known over the last four or five years and most significant I think recently

was the cataclysmic breach of data in the UK,

where a staffer at an agency loaded some 25 million records onto a disk, put it in the post, and the disk went missing.

And so factually, I think the likelihood of harm coming to people from that is relatively

low because it's probably literally

missing but it illustrates well the the problem of data breach. Frankly I

think one of the most important things to understand.

People often say data breach or data leak.

And data leak is a good way to talk about it

because data really is sort of like a liquid or a gas,

even a volatile gas.

So once it's out there, it's out there, and you can't collect it again.

You can't, when you leave a can of paint thinner out and it dries up,

well the gas is in the air all around you, you can't collect it again.

And that's what happens with data.

It moves around quite quickly.

...