[ISN] House leaders order data security review

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28967.html

By John Bresnahan
Politico
10/31/09 

Following the worst breach in the House Ethics Committee's security in 
the more than a decade, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader 
John Boehner announced Friday that they have ordered a review on the 
handling of sensitive data.

The statement by the two party leaders came after the Washington Post 
obtained an internal ethics committee document from late July outlining 
the status of investigations by the ethics panel and the Office of 
Congressional Ethics.

More than 30 lawmakers. names were on the status report, including 
senior members of the powerful Defense subcommittee of the House 
Appropriations Committee. These veteran members, including Reps. John 
Murtha (D-Pa.), Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) and James Moran (D-Va.), have 
been linked to the scandal surrounding the now defunct PMA Group, a 
once-powerful lobbying firm at the center of a Justice Department 
criminal probe.

The release of the ethics document, inadvertently placed on a 
file-sharing program by a now ex-ethics committee staffer while she 
worked from home on her personal computer, has proven a huge 
embarrassment for the ethics committee and lawmakers named in the 
report. While many of the allegations about the lawmakers in question 
had been raised publicly by previous media reports - some going back 
more than three years - the leak focused renewed attention on Congress. 
ongoing ethics problems.

[...]


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