The good news is that the United States government is going to give me three years of credit monitoring and identity theft protection absolutely free.
The bad news is that in March of 2014 the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management got hacked. The OPM cybersecurity team didn’t detect the hacking until April of the following year, by which time the hackers had stolen the records of 21 million people.
I’ve never been a government employee, but in the 1990s I had a national security clearance, and the stolen data includes records of people who applied for a clearance. I didn’t have to fill out the gigantic SF-86 form (the country was between the Cold War and the War on Terror, so security procedures were very relaxed) but I still had to provide a lot of information, all of it tied to my Social Security number. And apparently the OPM thinks the stolen data includes my information.
Which is why the government is now spending $133 million of taxpayer money to buy ID theft detection service for me and everyone else who got hit.
That could explain the funny postcard I got in the mail from the ‘Maricopa County Community College District’. It half looked like a scam, but it had all the earmarks of being legit.