FEMA has announced that recently discovered personal information including names, addresses, social security numbers, email addresses and other information on evacuees to Texas from Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina.
It said it learned of the problem when a Katrina evacuee found the information online and contacted the agency. FEMA then followed up and got the website hosting the information to remove it. It then found a second website featuring the same information, 16,875 lines of data in all, and got that one to remove it as well.
The agency, which is attempting to contact those affected and said it would offer free identify theft monitoring services, maintains that most of the applicant information posted on the websites was properly released by FEMA to a state agency which requested and received the information to fulfill routine needs following Katrina.
FEMA also said it is working with the state agency to investigate how the information was released and posted that way.