Extra, Extra, Read All About These 240,000 Credit Card Numbers

We wondered yesterday just how clueless newspaper owners really were, and two Massachusetts papers are doing their best to say "quite clueless indeed". It's got nothing to do with Google News, but the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette -- both owned by The New York Times -- exposed the credit card data of up to 240,000 subscribers. What's so stunning here isn't the mere leak of the data, since that's becoming so common, but rather how it was leaked. The Worcester paper prints its delivery routing slips on internally recycled paper -- the paper it used last weekend happened to be some sort of internal reports with all the credit card numbers on them. The paper now says it's taken "immediate steps" to increase security, and it's set up a hotline for subscribers to call and see if their credit card data was compromised. Why is the burden on their subscribers? Shouldn't the papers be proactively letting people know their card numbers could be circulating? It's continually amazing how so many of these data leaks aren't the results of anything active, like hackers, but rather just products of sheer stupidity.