Minnesota Rampage Leaves 10 Dead; Flow of Illegal Immigrants to U.S. Unabated; Data Thefts Prompting IT Security Checks

Minnesota Rampage Leaves 10 Dead

A gunman killed 10 people and injured more than a dozen others Monday during a rampage that began in a private home in an isolated Indian reservation in northern Minnesota and ended at the high school in Red Lake. According to the Washington Post, the gunman killed his grandfather and a woman at his house, then went to the high school where he shot down students, teachers and a security guard. Police engaged the gunman briefly before he killed himself. The shooting was the deadliest school incident since the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where two students killed 13 and wounded 23 before taking their own lives on April 20, 1999. “At this time, we do believe the shooter acted alone,” FBI spokesman Paul McCabe told the Post in a telephone interview Monday night.

For more details, read the full article in the Washington Post.

Flow of Illegal Immigrants to U.S. Unabated

More illegal immigrants continue to pour into the United States in spite of tighter border controls. According to a report in the Washington Post, the number of undocumented immigrants is estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic Center to be roughly 10.3 million as of march 2003, up from an estimate of 8.4 million in 2000. According to the latest estimate, Mexicans make up the largest percentage of illegal immigrants at 57 percent (or 5.9 million). “It’s clear that America’s lost control of its border,” said Steven Camarota, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls. “The problem is that once we all agree we have this enormous problem, then what to do about it is something we can’t agree on. When you can’t agree on the benefits and costs of a program, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to formulate any kind of a policy.”

For more details, read the full report in the Washington Post.

Data Thefts Prompting IT Security Checks

In light of recent data thefts at ChoicePoint, Bank of America, LexisNexis (and the list goes on), companies are turning to encryption and strict data protection rules to guard against similar breaches in the future. According to a story in Computerworld (a sister company of CXO Media), companies have shied away from encryption in the past because there’s too much processing overhead involved. Scott Jeffries, and independent IT consultant, told Computerworld that companies can take effective action against former and disgruntled employees by tightening password permissions and end-user access privileges. “Things in the news that are huge right now are one-off issues. I don’t think they’re systemic or point to a pattern or a huge hole necessarily,” Jeffries said.

For more details, read the full report in Computerworld.