The National Archives released thousands of declassified documents this week relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy—but in its effort to make the unredacted trove public, it published the Social Security numbers of over 200 former congressional staffers.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that buried within the 60,000 pages of mostly unredacted documents were the Social Security numbers of more than 100 staff members of the Senate Church Committee, and more than 100 staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The names of those who were doxxed include several high-profile figures, including a former assistant secretary of state, a former U.S. ambassador, and several prominent figures in the intelligence and legal fields.
The Senate Church Committee was formed in 1975 to study the intelligence abuses of federal agencies, and the Committee on Assassinations investigated Kennedy’s death.
Joseph diGenova, a former Trump campaign lawyer who previously investigated intelligence abuses in the 1970s, was not aware that his private information was included within the JFK files until the Post reached out to him. He called the move “absolutely outrageous,” “sloppy,” and “unprofessional.”
“It makes sense that my name is in there,” diGenova said. “But the other sensitive stuff—it’s like a first-grade, elementary-level rule of security to redact things like that.”
“It not only means identity theft, but I’ve had threats against me,” diGenova added.
One former Senate staffer, who spoke with the Post under the condition of anonymity, directed their ire at the Trump administration, now that they had become a target for identity theft and fraud.
“It just shows the danger of how this administration is handling these things with no thought of who gets damaged in the process,” they said.
Following up on his executive order from January, Trump had promised Monday that all the files related to the assassination would be made public by Tuesday afternoon—setting off a scramble at the Department of Justice to make it happen as quickly as possible. Attorneys in the DOJ’s National Security Division were called to urgently provide a second set of eyes to review the documents for release, even though they had already received an initial review by the FBI.
Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Post that the mass publication of sensitive information was “absolutely” a violation of the 1974 Privacy Act, which requires agencies to be careful in their handling of sensitive information.
“Social Security is literally the keys to the kingdom to everybody,” said Callahan.
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