Pentagon says it's hiding online SSNs

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Privacy Office says it is moving to ensure that military service members' Social Security numbers are redacted from the Internet.

Office director Samuel Jenkins said the Pentagon is addressing a problem disclosed a year ago in which the numbers of up to 500,000 armed services members were found to be available online via digitized versions of the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported Monday.

"We're at the beginning stages of this," Jenkins told the newspaper. "We're taking this very seriously and aggressively pursuing action."

But, Stars and Stripes said, the moves come a full year after the non-profit group Public.Resource.org revealed its discovery of hundreds of thousands of military officers' Social Security numbers contained in government and commercial databases, freely available to anyone with an Internet connection.

The Congressional Record printed officers' Social Security numbers starting in 1971 when the armed services began using them to identify troops, and continued to do so until 1996, the newspaper said.