If you are a concealed carry permit holder in Missouri, your identity has been compromised — to the United States federal government.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol has handed over what is supposed to be a confidential list of every concealed weapon permit holder in Missouri to the federal government. What’s worse? This is the second time they have done so, once in November 2011 and once in January on this year.
This list of more than 100,000 names was given to the federal government to supposedly investigate Social Security disability fraud.
“Apparently from what I understand, they wanted to match up anyone who had a mental diagnosis or disability with also having a concealed carry license,” Missouri state Sen. Kurt Schaefer (R-Boone and Cooper) told the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Schaefer and the state Senate Appropriations Committee uncovered this unsettling news on Wednesday, several weeks after the breach had been learned of by Missouri State Highway Patrol Col. Ron Replogle. A mid-level supervisor at the patrol got the list from the Missouri Department of Revenue and shared it with a Social Security Administration fraud investigator. Replogle admitted the list should have never been shared.
According to Replogle, the list was never actually accessed by the Social Security Administration because the encrypted files could not be read by the fraud investigator, who then destroyed the data.
