The FAA announced recently that personal information on roughly 45,000 employees and retires on the agency’s rolls as of early February 2006 was stolen after one of its servers was hacked into.
But the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, Patrick Forrey, lambasted the agency, calling the breach "preventable," and even going so far as to call for the "senior executives and managers responsible for these critical systems" to be fired.
In further calling the agency "reckless and negligent in the creation of its electronic personnel file system," he also showed an early rift with the Obama administration whose decision it was ultimately to wait a week before notifying employees.
"This is typical of the arrogance and lack of collaboration the agency has shown toward its employees," said Forrey. "The FAA waited an entire week before notifying the unions that its members’ personal information had been breached by a hacker."
Affected employees will receive individual letters to notify them about the breach and the agency said it was moving quickly to block similar incidents. It said the server was not connected to the agency’s air traffic control system or any other operational systems and that it has no reason to believe any of those systems have been compromised.