A Senate committee hearing on consumer data protection and identity theft adjourned early due to seven pressing votes on the Senate floor. The earlier-than-anticipated closing gavel meant that several witnesses, including Don McGuffey, vice president of ChoicePoint Inc., and Barbara Desoer, global technology, service, and fulfillment executive for Bank of America, did not face questions from the committee.
Senator Jon S. Corzine, (D-NJ); Amy S. Friend, assistant chief counsel, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Larry Johnson, special agent in charge, Criminal Investigative Division, United States Secret Service; Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT); and Deborah Platt Majoras, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission were able to present their testimony before the hearings were suspended.
Both ChoicePoint and Bank of America were recently involved with high-visibility instances of compromised consumer data. ChoicePoint sold 145,000 consumer records to scam artists posing as legitimate businesses, and Bank of America lost backup tapes containing records on 1.2 million consumers.
The lost tapes included credit card information on a large number of Department of Defense employees and a number of elected officials, including Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), all of whom sit on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, which hosted the hearing.
While the committee did not set a specific date for the hearing to reconvene, committee staffers indicated that Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday of next week would be the most likely days.
But the prepared remarks ChoicePoint
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